Bruce Runnegar from the University of California at Los Angeles' Center for Astrobiology... and his colleagues used computer models to map out the Solar System for the past 250 million years. In particular, they looked at the perihelion of each planet - the point in its orbit where it is closest to the Sun. The perihelion of Earth rotates around the Sun with a period of hundreds of thousands of years. Because of subtle tugs and pulls between the planets, this period changes slightly with time... Their model suggests one of these blips significantly changed Mercury's orbit 65 million years ago. This wobble would have pulled at the asteroid belt, increasing the chances that asteroids in the Hungarias region would be knocked out of place. Now the researchers are running a fresh set of models to see how much the orbits of these asteroids changed. It wouldn't have been enough to send a shower of asteroids into the Earth, but Runnegar says the wobble could have sent a single asteroid onto collision course with our planet... Now he is planning to run his models forward in time, to see when the next potentially catastrophic planetary wobble will be.

The idea that we pass through clouds of galactic debris is not new. In fact, a 2003 study found that we're traveling through a mild one right now... The dust layer would hover around Earth, reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the planet while letting terrestrial heat escape into space, creating a snowballing chill. "There are indications from 600 to 800 million years ago that at least two of four glaciations were snowball glaciations," Pavlov said. "The big mystery revolves around how they are triggered." Moderately dense space clouds, the sort that might destroy the ozone layer, are huge, Pavlov points out, and the solar system could take up to 500,000 years pass through one. Extra cosmic rays produced during such an event, owing to interactions of the interstellar dust with the Sun, would break up nitrogen molecules in Earth's atmosphere, leading to ozone destruction... Geologists could look for higher amounts of uranium 235 in soil layers corresponding to the time of known glaciations. Uranium 235 can't be produced naturally in the solar system.

Most scientists agree a meteor impact, called Chicxulub, in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, accompanied the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. But until now, the time of the Great Dying 250 million years ago, when 90 percent of marine and 80 percent of land life perished, lacked evidence and a location for a similar impact event. Becker and her team found extensive evidence of a 125-mile-wide crater, called Bedout, off the northwestern coast of Australia... During recent research in Antarctica, Becker and her team found meteoric fragments in a thin claystone "breccia" layer, pointing to an end-Permian event. The breccia contains the impact debris that resettled in a layer of sediment at end-Permian time. They also found "shocked quartz" in this area and in Australia... Quartz can be fractured by extreme volcanic activity, but only in one direction. Shocked quartz is fractured in several directions and is therefore believed to be a good tracer for the impact of a meteor... The Bedout impact crater is also associated in time with extreme volcanism and the break-up of Pangea. "We think that mass extinctions may be defined by catastrophes like impact and volcanism occurring synchronously in time," Becker said. "This is what happened 65 million years ago at Chicxulub but was largely dismissed by scientists as merely a coincidence. With the discovery of Bedout, I don't think we can call such catastrophes occurring together a coincidence anymore," she added.

The most common theory in recent years has been that hotspots exist in the Earth where molten lava wells up from deep below, creating volcanoes such as those that formed Hawaii and Iceland and seismic zones such as Yellowstone. But Gillian Foulger of the University of Durham, England, and James Natland of the University of Miami point out in the journal Science that efforts to find evidence of hotspots using seismic waves have not produced results... In a separate paper in the same journal, Donald J. DePaolo and Michael Manga of the University of California, Berkeley, agree that so far seismological studies searching for hotspots have not produced the expected proof. But they say they expect the evidence to be found. Theoretical and laboratory studies predict deep hot plumes, they note, and there is supporting evidence in the Hawaiian Island chain, with the rising lava building a line of islands as the overriding crust moves along, evidence of a stationary hotspot deep in the earth.

The most spectacular visitor from beyond was a meteorite initially said to set a village afire in India and injure 20 people this past weekend. Later reports by the BBC and elsewhere put the injuries at three. The fireball streaking through the sky turned night into day, witnesses said. It was reported visible across a nearly 5,800-square-mile (15,000-square-kilometer) region. Two pieces about 11 pounds each (5 kilograms) were said to be recovered. On Monday, Sept. 29, a bright fireball startled residents around San Francisco. Witnesses said it flared several times over a few seconds before disappearing below the horizon, according to a report in the San Jose Mercury News... Peter Jenniskens, an astronomer with the SETI Institute and NASA's Ames Research Center, told the newspaper that the event had the markings of comet debris, which is more fragile than asteroid material and therefore more likely to break apart and generate a bright flare... Jenniskens said the fireball might have been part of an unexpected shower of debris. Another bright meteor had been spotted five hours prior from Europe, he said. Another bright and fiery object was seen in the night sky over Australia this past weekend, near the time of the Indian meteorite... One that did not fully vaporize hit Roy Fausset's recently renovated bathroom Sept. 23 in New Orleans.

Rivers -- even short, glacier-fed rivers -- in Antarctica? Geologists maintain that during the last ice age, ending about 10,000 B.C., Antarctic ice extended north to cover Patagonia, and then contracted to its present continental dimensions. So Piri Re'is's ice-free coasts and islands and Oronteus Finaeus' rivers had to be imaginary. Yet as Hapgood was to learn, cores taken in 1949 from the bottom of the Ross Sea, across Antarctica from Queen Maud Land, consisted, at depths laid down over many millennia ending by about 4000 B.C., of the fine-grained sediment washed down by rivers in temperate lands.

In Renaissance maps of northern regions Hapgood found other puzzling features: an ice-free Greenland; the British Isles with glaciers covering their centers; a partly glaciated Sweden; the Aegean Sea dotted with numerous extra islands that had since been drowned, presumably, by the melting of ice further north; and the precisely drawn Pacific Coast of North America still connected by a land bridge to Asia.

By some calculations, the rock, an asteroid or a comet that crossed Earth's path, should have hit the ground at 72,000 kilometres per hour, for it left a huge crater 1.2 kilometres across and 150 metres deep.

If so, the high-velocity collision should have released so much heat that the iron-rich impacting rock itself, or at least part of it, should have melted in a flash. But no substantial signs of melted mineral have ever been found there.

The reason, according to the new study: the rock was merely the largest chunk from a space bruiser that probably measured 42 metres across.

After entering Earth's atmosphere, the giant broke apart at an altitude of around 14 kilometres as it encountered a steadily denser atmosphere, whose pressure both cushioned the descent and caused the rock to fracture.

The fragments then descended in a pancake-shaped cluster, with atmospheric drag acting as a brake.

The piece that created Meteor Crater was probably around 20 metres across and hit the ground at 43,000 kilometres per hour, releasing the equivalent force of 2.5 megatons of TNT, or at least 150 times the "Little Boy" atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, the study suggests.

The hunt for natural causes for these human disasters began when the Frenchman Claude Schaeffer, one of the leading archaeologists of his time, published his book Stratigraphie Comparee et Chronologie L'Asie Occidentale in 1948. Schaeffer analysed and compared the destruction layers of more than 40 archaeological sites in the Near and Middle East, from Troy to Tepe Hissar on the Caspian Sea and from the Levant to Mesopotamia. He was the first scholar to detect that all had been totally destroyed several times in the Early, Middle and Late Bronze Age, apparently simultaneously. Since the damage was far too excessive and did not show signs of military or human involvement, he argued that repeated earthquakes might have been responsible for these events.

The cataclysm went far beyond the regular insults from which living things must recover. The asteroid or comet flashed through the sky more than 40 times as fast as the speed of sound. It was so large that when its leading edge made contact with ground, its trailing edge was at least as high as the cruising altitude of a commercial airliner. It produced an explosion equivalent to 100 trillion tons of TNT, a greater release of energy than any event on our planet in the 65 million years since then... The crater, called Chicxulub after modern Maya villages in the area, is approximately 180 kilometers in diameter and is surrounded by a circular fault 240 kilometers across, apparently produced when the crust reverberated with the shock of the impact...

A mysterious flash on the Moon caught on camera 50 years ago is still provoking disagreements about its origin. Astronomer Bonnie Buratti says her new results show that the flash was caused by a 20-metre asteroid hitting the Moon... Amateur astronomer Leon Stuart's 1953 photograph of the Moon shows a light spot near the centre of the Moon's visible surface. It would take a half-megaton explosion to produce such a flash, says Buratti, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena.

The resulting crater would not be visible from Earth, but it should appear on close-ups taken by lunar probes. In a future issue of the journal Icarus, Buratti reports a fresh impact scar at the site of the 1953 flash on images collected by the Clementine spacecraft as it orbited the Moon in 1994. A bright blanket of ejected material covers an area that is about 1.5 kilometres across, and the colour of the debris indicates that the crater is relatively new.

The dozen small distant moons of Saturn discovered in 2000 are pieces of larger bodies shattered by cometary impacts, say planetary scientists. Researchers already knew that the new moons must have been captured as the planet formed because they have irregular orbits that keeps them 10 to 20 million kilometres from Saturn. But it now appears that the six to 32 km bodies are only fragments of the original objects... Two groups formed when comets demolished larger, captured moons. The other was formed when a one to three kilometre comet blasted chunks of Phoebe, a 220-km satellite of Saturn, into orbit... The idea of catastrophic cometary impacts on moons is not new. Earlier work indicated that some small inner moons, such as Miranda, reassembled themselves after being shattered by collisions... The Earth's lone Moon has probably survived destruction because comet impacts are much less common in the inner Solar System.

Kyte et al have discovered a 2.3-million year-old sedimentary layer under the Antarctic Ocean that contains iridium and gold concentrations comparable to those in the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. The noble metals are mostly contained in millimeter-sized grains that resemble ablation debris from a large extraterrestrial object. Unlike the Cretaceous-Tertiary episode, however, the newly found layer is not accompanied by evidence of mass biological extinctions.

Peter Webb and his coworkers have found pollen and the remains of roots and stems of plants in an area stretching some 1300 kilometers along the Transantarctic Mountains. The Antarctic wood is so recent that it floats and burns with ease. Webb's group postulates that a shrub-like forest grew in Antarctica as recently as 3 million years ago... Nevertheless, these deposits of fresh-looking wood do suggest that trees recently grew only 400 miles from the South Pole. Also of interest is the fact that the sedimentary layers containing the wood have been displaced as much as 3000 meters by faults, indicating recent large-scale geological changes.

W. Zinsmeister was accustomed to scoff at the idea that the Age of Dinosaurs ended violently with the impact of a giant asteroid some 65 million years ago. He always asked: "Where's the layer of burnt and twisted dinosaur bones?" His certainty was shaken, however, when he began mapping fossil deposits on Seymour Island, Antarctica. He didn't find the dinosaur bones but rather a giant bed of fish bones at least 50 square kilometers in area. Some sort of catastrophe must have annihilated untold millions of fish. And guess what? This great bone bed was deposited directly on top of that layer of extraterrestrial iridium that marks the 65-million-year-old Cretaceous Tertiary boundary at many sites around the world.

Over a million large asteroids, each several kilometres wide, are orbiting the Sun in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. There are sometimes violent collisions... Collisions in the Asteroid Belt result in the asteroids being completely destroyed and shattered into countless pieces. Computer simulations predict that most of these fragments will eventually fall into the Sun. Some of them, however, will hit the Earth after millions of years as meteorites... Collisional fragments from asteroids in space are constantly being hit by cosmic radiation. This creates noble gases from nuclear reactions. These gases do not enter into any further chemical reactions. Therefore, during the entire duration of the radiation, i.e., the travel time of the fragment in space, they accumulate in the fragment. After measuring the concentration of these so-called cosmogenic inert gases, the travel time from original body to Earth can be calculated. The higher the concentration, the longer the meteorite was underway... The researchers used meteorites for their tests that are assumed to be the results of a huge asteroid collision in the recent history of the solar system. These meteorites were found in a stone quarry in southern Sweden in a 480 million year old seabed deposit... With the new method, it could be proven for the first time that the noble gases in the meteorites in southern Sweden were already in the meteorites 480 million years ago. The calculated travel time was reduced to a few hundred thousand years, which corresponds to the lower limits predicted by the computer simulations. These were the first fragments to arrive on Earth after a great collision. The short radiation age is a clue that the collision took place in the proximity of an orbital resonance in the Asteroid Belt. In addition, it could be proven that the fossil meteorites from southern Sweden all stem from the same event. The newly developed method from the Institute for Isotope Geology makes it possible to confirm the theories about the behaviour of asteroid fragments in space. This will make it significantly easier for researchers to predict future collisions with our planet.

Four planets are now known (or are at least suspected) to orbit 55 Cancri (Cnc), making it appear something like our own Solar System. In addition, the star has a distant red dwarf companion. Farthest out, at 5.9 Astronomical Units (AU) from the star, is the most massive, 55 Cnc-d, which is at least 4.1 times the mass of Jupiter and takes 14.7 years to orbit. The other three are much closer and less massive. Next in order are 55 Cnc c, b, and e with minimum masses of 0.21, 0.84, 0.045 solar, orbital radii of 0.24, 0.11, 0.038 AU, and periods of 44, 14.7, and 2.81 days. The existence of 55 Cnc-c is questionable. 55 Cnc-e has the smallest measured minimum mass, only about that of Uranus or Neptune. It is also closest to its parent star, its orbit just 10 percent the size of that of Mercury.

The star, 55 Cancri in the constellation Cancer, was already known to have one planet, announced by Butler and Marcy in 1996. That planet is a gas giant slightly smaller than the mass of Jupiter and whips around the star in 14.6 days at a distance only one-tenth that from Earth to the Sun. Using as a yardstick the 93-million mile Earth-Sun distance, called an astronomical unit or AU, the newfound planet orbits at 5.5 AU, comparable to Jupiter's distance from our Sun of 5.2 AU (or about 512 million miles). Its slightly elongated orbit takes it around the star in about 13 years, comparable to Jupiter's orbital period of 11.86 years. It is 3.5 to 5 times the mass of Jupiter... The star 55 Cancri is 41 light years from Earth and is about 5-billion years old. Further data are needed to determine whether yet another planet is orbiting it, because the two known planets do not explain all the observed Doppler wobbling. One possible explanation is a Saturn-mass planet orbiting about .24 AU from the star.

[T]he planet recently discovered around the sun-like 55 Cancri completes a full orbit in less than three days, compared to the 365-day year of planet Earth. This Neptune-sized planet circles its star much more closely than the Earth orbits the Sun. In fact, it circles 55 Cancri at a distance of 3.5 million miles  less than 4% the distance between the Earth and the Sun. The other planet just announced  which circles Gliese 436 at a distance of 2.6 million miles  also orbits at relatively short range, at least when compared to Earths 93 million mile distance from the Sun... As the only four-planet system known thus far, in McArthurs view the 55 Cancri system is the closest analog we have to our own solar system. In fact, the earlier detection of planets around 55 Cancri was sufficient reason to put it toward the top of the list of stars to be observed by the SETI Institutes Project Phoenix, which looked at the star several years ago. Using a custom-made supercomputer and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia, 55 Cancri was examined as part of as part of the worlds most sensitive search for extraterrestrial intelligence. No signs of intelligence were found.

The star may be roughly twice (186 percent) as enriched as Sol with elements heavier than hydrogen ("metallicity"), based on its abundance of iron (Marcy et al, 2002, in pdf; and exoplanets.org). It appears to be either a super metal-rich dwarf or a slightly metal-poor K0 subgiant (Baliunas et al, 1997), but a recent study suggests that the metals enrichment may have been primordial (Santos et al, 2001). According to the Yale Bright Star Catalogue, 1991 5th Revised Edition notes entry for HR 3522, enhanced CN and C2 and perhaps CH has been detected in its spectrum. The star may be between two to eight billion years old (e.g., five billion years old, see: Marcy et al, 2002, in pdf; and Baliunas et al, 1997) -- appearing to be middle aged and chromospherically inactive. 55 Cancri A has a widely separated, dim companion Star ("B") located about 1,100 AUs (85" at 40.9 ly) away that seems to be gravitationally bound to it.

55 Cancri b is a massive planet, orbiting very close to its parent star. In this respect it is similar to 51 Pegasi b, though these two worlds are different in some important aspects. Both planets are sufficiently massive to retain an atmosphere, but for 51 Pegasi b, it will be blown into space by the nearby star. 55 Cancri b has more than twice the orbital radius than 51 Pegasi b and a higher mass, so it would retain most of its gases. If it actually formed at its current position, an issue highly disputed among scientists, it would have a large, rocky core. With its high mass and dense atmosphere, 55 Cancri b may look like a hybrid between Venus and Jupiter.

There are strong sources of heat on 55 Cancri b. One of them is the intense radiation from the nearby star, but another source is tidal friction caused by the star's gravity. The planet's surface may even be completely molten. Enormous volcanic eruptions would fill the atmosphere with carbondioxide and sulphur compounds, producing a thick yellowish cloud cover. Any daring explorer would be crushed by the immense pressure at ground level, and vaporized by the heat - and he could not even see the disk of dust recently discovered around 55 Cancri.

No known form of life could exist on 55 Cancri b. A volcanically hyperactive world, where pure sulphuric acid rains on oceans of molten rock, and titanic strikes of lightning from earth-sized thunderclouds give an eerie illumination, 55 Cancri b would be among the best places to call Hell.

Back in 1935, Eugene Wigner, one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics and at the time a professor at Princeton University, suggested that hydrogen, an inert molecular gas at ambient conditions, could turn into a metallic solid, similar to lithium or sodium, at sufficiently high pressure. Wigner's proposal implied a remarkable complexity for "element one," the simplest chemical entity, one electron bound to one proton... Jupiter's magnetic field, first measured by Voyager spacecraft, is ten times stronger than Earth's, and its pattern is considerably more complex. Part of this complexity could be accounted for if the source of the field lay much farther from the center, in relative terms, than does Earth's. Wigner's prediction of metallic hydrogen was based on a simplified analysis of the electronic ground state, but the pressure he calculated for the transition to the metallic state, about 250,000 atmospheres, corresponded to a depth of less than one-twentieth of the planetary radius of Jupiter. In other words, most of the solar system's largest gas giant had to be in a metallic state -- although the metallic hydrogen would have to be a fluid rather than a solid to provide dynamo action... The fact is that the Earth's core is not pure iron but contains about 10 percent (by weight) of other constituents. If you compare the density of the outer core that is derived from seismological data with that of pure iron shocked to comparable pressures and temperatures, the core's density turns out to be about 10 percent lower. Even when the melting temperature of pure iron is accurately known at 2 million to 4 million atmospheres of pressure, we will still have to make a correction for the effect of contaminants. Alloying often decreases the freezing temperature of a material; this is why ice can be melted by putting salt on top of it. The actual freezing temperature at the innerouter core boundary may therefore be 1,000 kelvins or so lower than that of pure iron.

The researchers calculated what would happen at temperatures and pressures likely near the cores of the two exoplanets, Jupiter and Saturn, where temperatures run close to 18,000 F and pressures 10 million bars (a bar is essentially atmospheric pressure at sea level). They found that even post-perovskite could not withstand such conditions, and its crystals would dissociate into two new forms. Focusing on one of those crystals, the researchers discovered that they would behave almost like metals. That is, electrons in the crystals would be very mobile and carry electric current. This would have the effect of supporting the planet's magnetic field (if it has one) and inhibiting reversals of the field. The increased electrical activity would also help transport energy out of the core and toward the planet surface. This could result in more severe activities such as quakes and volcanoes on the surface. The effect would be much stronger in Dense-Saturn than in Super-Earth.

[Herndon] draws unhappy conclusions from his bumpy scientific career. Had his two sons -- now physicians -- planned to become scientists, he says, "I would have steered them away from it because you can't make a living and do legitimate science; you have to 'howl with the wolves' or you don't survive. This is a sad testament to our times. There's something very wrong in American science."

To the rhinos and crocodiles of the far north, the day was like any other. They ate, swam and napped, unaware a celestial body was headed their way at 60,000 miles per hour. Suddenly, a wayward comet screamed into the atmosphere, struck Earth and created a bowl a mile deep and 15 miles in diameter.

Haughton Crater is the remaining scar from a high-speed collision between Earth and some heavy object from space about 23 million years ago. The comet or asteroid that created the crater was perhaps more than a mile (up to 2 kilometers) across and slammed into the forest that existed on Devon Island. Everything was annihilated for scores of miles in all directions. The impact churned up rock from more than a mile below the surface, vaporizing much of it. It's estimated that between 70 and 100 billion tons of rock was excavated from the crater in the moments just after the impact. While clouds of dust and gas filled the air, rock rained down from the sky, much of it in the form of what geologists now call breccia, which simply means "broken up." Scattered within the breccia are pieces of a rock called gneiss that normally is dark and dense. In Haughton Crater breccia, the "shocked gneiss" resembles pumice stone -- it's ash-white, porous and very lightweight.

"Yet, as it will, life returned to this site of complete devastation... The world those fossils described, the one that flourished on the order of 20 million years ago, during the early Miocene epoch, was strikingly different from today's Arctic... Devon Island was covered with a forest of birch trees and conifers, a landscape that one now finds about 2,000 miles to the south, in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Maine. Now-extinct forms of rhinoceros and mouse deer browsed among the trees; shrews and pika-like relatives of modern rabbits darted through the shadows; and freshwater fish swam the lakes and streams...

"Even farther back, on the order of 45 to 65 million years ago, during the Paleocene and Eocene epochs, the fossil record shows Devon Island to have been still more profoundly different. Back then, what is now the Arctic was a region of swampy lowlands, slow-moving rivers, and towering forests of dawn redwood, kadsura, and ancestral forms of hickory, elm, birch, sycamore, and maple. Primitive fishes, crocodiles, salamanders, newts, and turtles inhabited the rivers and marshes, while the forests and meadows supported flying lemurs, early primates, forerunners of today's cats and dogs, and ancestors of the rhinos, tapirs, and horses."

"...the Antarctic beech trees are from two to three million years old. The point that was being made was that plate tectonics, as a theory, was incapable of explaining the existence of this forest so close to the South Pole a mere two to three million years ago. This is not to say that plate tectonics is wrong: it is simply insufficient on its own to account for these facts. At the slow pace of change demanded by plate tectonics the beech trees would have to be many millions (not just 2 or 3 million) of years old to be 200 miles from the South Pole. In other words, to account for the beech forest on Antarctica we need another whole Earth theory to explain the facts. Earth crust displacement is a complementary whole earth theory to plate tectonics that can account for these facts. We are not disputing the power of the plate tectonic theory: we are simply adding another set of lens with which the past might be viewed."

"At the end of Pleistocene, an asteroid or a comet impact triggered a shift of the poles, according to the mechanism explained in the previous communication. This resulted in the world-wide catastrophe remembered by traditions as the 'universal flood', during which Atlantis sunk (temporarily) in the ocean. Soon after, the glaciation covered the Atlantic coasts of Antarctica, thus deleting all archaeological evidence."

"Evidence exists that the poles have changed position during the past ages. This possibility, however, so far has been disregarded on the basis that such a phenomenon is thought to be physically impossible. The following article shows the possibility of very rapid shifts of the poles due to the impact of astronomical objects as small as a half-kilometer diameter asteroid... In the immediate surroundings of these masses of ice one of the most impressive zoological communities of all times thrived. Millions (more than 40 millions, according to F.C. Hibben) of mammoths roamed Siberia and Alaska, large animals the size of which can be found today only in tropical regions, or in those areas where the supply of fodder is guaranteed all the year round."

The Sun likely contains nearly three times more neon than previously thought, according to a new study. The finding, if shown to be accurate, solves a theoretical problem regarding how stars in general work... The model was put into question, however, when their value for the neon abundance in the Sun differed from those calculated using other techniques... Drake said the disagreement about the concentration of neon may have been due to problems with both the solar wind technique and the X-ray method... Drake and his colleague Paola Testa from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology got around these problems by measuring the neon abundance of 21 nearby Sun-like stars using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory... nearby stars contained three times more neon than was calculated for the Sun... Drake said the same technique could be used on our own Sun, if not for one problem: the detectors on Chandra's instruments would fry because of the heat.

IOL | 9-5-2003Amateur geologist makes surprise find September 05 2003 at 08:45AM Tokyo - A crater from a meteorite impact more than 20 000 years ago has been discovered in the Japanese Alps, an amateur geologist announced this week. The crater is the first found in this country. Masao Sakamoto said the crater stretches 900m in diameter and spreads out across rugged, heavily forested land in Nagano state, about 160km west of Tokyo. Sakamoto, who announced his discovery at an academic symposium earlier this week, said it went largely unnoticed because only about 40 percent of the crater is visible. "If it...

BBC | 8-23-2004Antarctic craters reveal strike The asteroid may have raised sea levels by up to 60cm Scientists have mapped enormous impact craters hidden under the Antarctic ice sheet using satellite technology. The craters may have either come from an asteroid between 5 and 11km across that broke up in the atmosphere, a swarm of comets or comet fragments. The space impacts created multiple craters over an area of 2,092km (1,300 miles) by 3,862km (2,400 miles). The scientists told a conference this week that the impacts occurred roughly 780,000 years ago during an ice age. When the impacts hit, they would have...

washingtonpost.com | February 26, 2006 | Joshua FoerA mysterious cataclysm almost brought about the end of the world some 250 million years ago The last time Earth experienced a mass extinction, some 65 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period, there is little doubt about what happened. A humongous meteor slammed into the Yucatan Peninsula, incinerating everything around for thousands of miles. Plumes of vaporized rock blanketed the planet in a layer of thick ash, blocking the sun and choking off photosynthesis. The entire global ecosystem virtually collapsed in a geological eye-blink. Though the dinosaurs might find it crass to say so, the late...

American Scientist | September-October 2001 | Armand H. DelsemmeAbstract: The young Earth appear to have been bombarded by comets for several hundred million years shortly after it was formed. This onslaught, perhaps involving hundreds of millions of comet impacts, is currently the best explantion for the origin of the Earth's oceans, atmosphere and organic molecules. Although historically a controversial idea, there is now a considerable amount of physical and chemical evidence supporting the theory. Comet scientist Armand Delsemme reviews the evidence and argues that comets from the vicinity of Jupiter contributed the bulk of the constituents found in Earth's biosphere.

AP via Yahoo | 3/9/05It's a mystery that has puzzled scientists for years but researchers said Wednesday they have discovered why there isn't much melted rock at the famous Meteor Crater in northern Arizona. An iron meteorite traveling up to 12 miles per second was thought to have blasted out the huge hole measuring three-quarters of a mile across in the desert. The impact of an object at that speed should have left large volumes of melted rock at the site. But British and American scientists said the reason it didn't was because the meteorite was traveling slower than previously estimated. "We conclude that...

Ananova | 10-4-2002Asteroid 'hit northern Russia' A large meteorite is thought to have smashed into a forest in a remote area of Russia. Residents in the town of Bodaibo, in the Irkutsk region of Siberia, saw a large luminous body fall from the sky. They say the impact caused the ground to shake and made a sound like thunder. Flashes of bright light could be seen above the impact site, which was a long way from any settlements according to the Russian newspaper Pravda. "Locals felt a strong shock, which could be comparable to an earthquake," said the report. "In addition to...

Reuters | Mon Mar 1, 2004 | Maggie FoxScientists probing a vast crater off Mexico's Yucatan peninsula questioned a popular theory about dinosaurs on Monday, saying the collision that formed the crater happened too far back in time to have caused their extinction by itself. Much evidence points to the idea that an asteroid or comet gouged the Earth around 65 million years ago, triggering volcanic and climate changes that eventually wiped out the dinosaurs. When the huge, mostly underwater crater was found off Yucatan, it seemed the perfect candidate. "Since the early 1990s the Chicxulub crater on Yucatan, Mexico, has been hailed as the smoking gun that...

EurekAlert | 3-Feb-2004 | Dr Derek Ward-ThompsonPublic release date: 3-Feb-2004 Contact: Dr Derek Ward-Thompson derek.ward-thompson@astro.cf.ac.uk 029-2087-5314 Cardiff University Astronomers unravel a mystery of the Dark Ages Undergraduates' work blames comet for 6th-century "nuclear winter" Scientists at Cardiff University, UK, believe they have discovered the cause of crop failures and summer frosts some 1,500 years ago ñ a comet colliding with Earth. The team has been studying evidence from tree rings, which suggests that the Earth underwent a series of very cold summers around 536-540 AD, indicating an effect rather like a nuclear winter. The scientists in the School of Physics and Astronomy believe this was caused...

Science Daily | 3-4-2002Date: Posted 3/4/2002 Cataclysm 3.9 Billion Years Ago Was Caused By Asteroids, Not Comets, Researchers Say WASHINGTON (February 28, 2002) -- The bombardment that resurfaced the Earth 3.9 billion years ago was produced by asteroids, not comets, according to David Kring of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and Barbara Cohen, formerly at the UA and now with the University of Hawaii. Their findings appear today in the Journal of Geophysical Research - Planets, published by the American Geophysical Union. The significance of this conclusion is that the bombardment was so severe that it destroyed older rocks on ...

Alaska Science Forum | February 10, 1983 | Larry GedneyEarly in the evening of June 18, 1178, a group of men near Canterbury, England, stood admiring the sliver of a new moon hanging low in the west. In terms they later described to a monk who recorded their sighting, "Suddenly a flaming torch sprang from the moon, spewing fire, hot coals and sparks." In continuing their description of the event, they reported that "The moon writhed like a wounded snake and finally took on a blackish appearance"... [P]lanetary scientist Jack Hartung of the State University of New York... gathered enough clues to suggest that a large asteroid... might have...

Natinal Geographic | 11-13-2001 | Hillary MayellChesapeake Bay Crater Offers Clues to Ancient Cataclysm Hillary Mayell for National Geographic News November 13, 2001 About 35 million years agoóthe dinosaurs are dead, but the Appalachian Mountains are still covered in tropical rain forestsóa rock from space that was more than a mile wide and moving at supersonic speed crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off North America. Traveling at about 70,000 miles (113,000 kilometers) an hour, the asteroid or comet (bolide) splashed through several hundred feet of water and several thousand feet of mud and sediment. Drilling for Knowledge A trailer hauls drilling rods the U.S. Geological Survey ...

Clare County Library | prior to November 19, 2005 | staff writerAccording to the "Annals of the Four Masters" the island was once called Fitha Island and it formed part of the mainland until the day "the sea swelled so high that it burst its boundaries, overflowing a large tract of country, and drowning over 1,000 persons." This happened on March 16th, 804. Some reports describe it as an earthquake, others as a tidal wave when "the sea divided the island of Fitha into three parts." These three islands are Mutton Island, Inismattle (or Illanwattle) and Roanshee (or Carrig na Ron). There is a fourth island in the area called Carraig...

New Scientist | 10-3-2003 | Jeff HechtClosest asteroid yet flies past Earth 18:17 02 October 03 NewScientist.com news service An asteroid about the size of a small house passed just 88,000 kilometres from the Earth by on Saturday 27 September - the closest approach of a natural object ever recorded. Geostationary communication satellites circle the Earth 42,000km from the planet's centre. The asteroid, designated 2003 SQ222, came from inside the Earth's orbit and so was only spotted after it had whizzed by. The first sighting was on Sunday 28 by the Lowell Observatory Near-Earth Object Search program in Arizona, US. Amateur astronomer Peter Birtwhistle of Great...

Thunderbolts.info | Feb 27, 2006Though NASA officials have said nothing on the subject, astronomy today is on the edge of a critical shift in perceptionóa revolution that could redefine our view of the heavens. Credit NASA Above, the 'Great Comet' of 1996, Hyakutake. The stunning discovery of X-ray emissions from the visitor was a milestone in comet science, as was the discovery that the comet's coherent and filamentary ion tail spanned more than 350 million miles. Proponents of the 'Electric Universe' say that a revolution in the sciences is inescapable, and they believe the failure of modern comet theory could be the tipping point....

SIS Conference | 1-26-2003 | Emilio Spedicato1. Introduction As related by Clube and Napier in their monograph The Cosmic Winter, see [1], in the year 1178 A.D. four wise men of Canterbury were sitting outside on a clear and calm 18th June night, a half Moon standing placidly in the starry sky. Suddenly they noticed a flame jutting out of a horn of the Moon. Then they saw the Moon tremble and its colour change slowly from light brilliant to a darker reddish tone. Such a colour remained for all the time the Moon was visible during that phase. This story is found in a manuscript...

New Scientist | 1 June 2005 | David L ChandlerOn 26 May, JPL's unique orbital calculation software determined that Comet Catalina was on what could possibly be a collision course with Earth, though the odds of such an impact were small: just 1 chance in 300,000 of a strike on June 11, 2085. Based on the 980-metre size estimate, that would produce a 6-gigaton impact - equivalent to 6 billion tonnes of TNT. Astronomers expected the addition of further observations to the calculations to rule out any possibility of a collision, as happens with most newly-seen objects. But that did not quite happen. The comet's predicted pathway actually drew...

Science Tuesday/Space.com | 11-13-2002 | Robert Roy BritComets, Meteors & Myth: New Evidence for Toppled Civilizations and Biblical Tales By Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer posted: 07:00 am ET 13 November 2001 "...and the seven judges of hell ... raised their torches, lighting the land with their livid flame. A stupor of despair went up to heaven when the god of the storm turned daylight into darkness, when he smashed the land like a cup." -- An account of the Deluge from the Epic of Gilgamesh, circa 2200 B.C. If you are fortunate enough to see the storm of shooting stars predicted for the Nov. 18...

RedNova | Monday, 5 September 2005, 20:43 CDT | staff / press releaseWhat a powerful telescope had picked up as it stretched towards the night sky over Antarctica was the trail of dust left in the wake of the death of an asteroid... "What he didn't know at the time was that seven hours earlier an asteroid had crashed to Earth in another part of Antarctica, about 1500 kms west of Davis. The closest it got to human habitation was around 900 kms west of Japan's Syowa station," Dr Klekociuk said... Dr Klekociuk said that it was thought that the asteroid had come from what is known as the Aten group somewhere...

Time Magazine | May 5 1997 | Anthony Spaeth with Maseeh Rahman/DahodThe Shiva Crater is discussed in a recent article in Memoirs of the Queensland Museum, an Australian scientific journal, by the two scientists. In the early 1990s, based on new geological evidence, Chatterjee surmised that a crater extending from the seabed off the city of Bombay into the state of Gujarat was created by a meteor fall. He named it after Shiva. He also argued that the Shiva Crater was actually one-half of a larger crater; the other part lay undersea near the Seychelle Islands, 2,800 km southeast of India. When pieced together, the original crater (split by continental shifting)...

RedNova.com | 11.3.03For the next few days backyard astronomers can see for themselves the long lost asteroid Hermes. Science@NASA -- It's dogma now: an asteroid hit Earth 65 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs. But in 1980 when scientists Walter and Luis Alvarez first suggested the idea to a gathering at the American Association for Advancement of Sciences, their listeners were skeptical. Asteroids hitting Earth? Wiping out species? It seemed incredible. At that very moment, unknown to the audience, an asteroid named Hermes halfway between Mars and Jupiter was beginning a long plunge toward our planet. Six months later it...

The Universe | 9-1999 | Greg BryantThe Dark Ages : Were They Darker Than We Imagined? By Greg Bryant Published in the September 1999 issue of Universe As we approach the end of the Second Millennium, a review of ancient history is not what you would normally expect to read in the pages of Universe. Indeed, except for reflecting on the AD 837 apparition of Halley's Comet (when it should have been as bright as Venus and would have moved through 60 degrees of sky in one day as it passed just 0.03 AU from Earth - three times closer than Hyakutake in 1996), you may...

Purdue University | 2004-06-24 | news release issued by Purdue UniversityDark Days Doomed Dinosaurs, Say Purdue Scientists WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. ? Though the catastrophe that destroyed the dinosaurs' world may have begun with blazing fire, it probably ended with icy darkness, according to a Purdue University research group. By analyzing fossil records, a team of scientists including Purdue's Matthew Huber has found evidence that the Earth underwent a sudden cooling 65 million years ago that may have taken millennia to abate completely. The fossil rock samples, taken from a well-known archaeological site in Tunisia, show that tiny, cold-loving ocean organisms called dinoflagellates and benthic formanifera appeared suddenly in an ancient...

Guardian | February 6, 2003 | Duncan SteelA metallic asteroid may have coincided with the fall of Rome, says Duncan Steel Thursday February 6, 2003 The Guardian In the early fifth century, rampaging Goths swept through Italy. Inviolate for 1,100 years, Rome was sacked by the hordes in 410 AD. St Augustine's apologia, the City of God, set the tone for Christians for the next 16 centuries. But the Rome of that era came close to suffering a far worse calamity. A small metallic asteroid descended from the sky, making a hypervelocity impact in an Apennine valley just 60 miles east of the city. This bus-sized lump...

Discovering Archaeology | July/August 1999 | Mike BaillieDid Asteroids and Comets Turn the Tides of Civilization? By Mike Baillie The heart of humanity seems at times to have lost its cadence, the rhythmic beat of history collapsing into impotent chaos. Wars raged. Pestilence spread. Famine reigned. Death came early and hard. Dynasties died, and civilization flickered. Such a time came in the sixth century A.D. The Dark Ages settled heavily over Europe. Rome had been beaten back from its empire. Art and science stagnated. Even the sun turned its back. "We marvel to see no shadows of our bodies at noon, to feel the mighty vigor of...

BBC NEWS | 05/31/04 | N/ADino impact gave Earth the chill A cloud of sulphate particles may have blocked out the sun's warmth Evidence has been found for a global winter following the asteroid impact that is thought to have killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Rocks in Tunisia reveal microscopic cold-water creatures invaded a warm sea just after the space rock struck Earth. The global winter was probably caused by a pollutant cloud of sulphate particles released when the asteroid vapourised rocks at Chicxulub, Mexico. The results are reported in the latest issue of the journal Geology. Italian, US and Dutch...

AP via Yahoo | Tue Jun 1 2004 | StaffCAPE CHARLES, Va. - Geologists drilling half a mile below Virginia's Eastern Shore say they have uncovered more signs of a space rock's impact 35 million years ago. For more than two weeks, scientists drilled around the clock alongside a parking lot across the harbor from Cape Charles. They stopped at 2,700 feet. From the depths came jumbled, mixed bits of crystalline and melted rock that can be dated, as well as marine deposits, brine and other evidence of an ancient comet or asteroid that slammed into once-shallow waters near the Delmarva Peninsula. Cape Charles is considered Ground Zero for...

New Scientist | 12-13-2002 | Kate RaviliousEarth's volcanism linked to meteorite impacts 14:31 13 December 02 Exclusive from New Scientist Print EditionSpace rocks are blamed for violent eruptions (Image: GETTY) Large meteorite impacts may not just throw up huge dust clouds but also punch right through the Earth's crust, triggering gigantic volcanic eruptions. The idea is controversial, but evidence is mounting that the Earth's geology has largely been driven by such events. This would also explain why our planet has so few impact crater remnants. Counting the number of asteroids we see in the sky suggests that over the past 250 million years, Earth should have...

Space.com | November 16, 2001 | By Robert Roy Britt, Senior Science Writer, SPACE.comFriday November 16 09:37 AM EST Earthgrazers and Fireballs: The Strange Side of The Leonid Meteor ShowerBy Robert Roy BrittSenior Science Writer, SPACE.com &nbsp;&nbsp;The Leonid meteor shower is a strange show. Its meteors are among the fastest known. It is notoriously difficult to predict. And it is a total night owl, refusing to show its best stuff until well after midnight. But while the 2001 Leonids will likely be remembered for the sheer volume of shooting stars, there are some strange characters to look for as the shower's source ekes above the eastern horizon late Saturday night and early Sunday ...

The Times (UK) | April 18, 2005 | By Nigel HawkesA HUGE asteroid which is on a course to miss the Earth by a whisker in 2029 could go round its orbit again and score a direct hit a few years later. Astronomers have calculated that the 1,000ft-wide asteroid called 2004 MN4 will pass by the Earth at a distance of between 15,000 and 25,000 miles -- about a tenth of the distance between the Earth and the Moon and close enough to be seen with the naked eye. Although they are sure that it will miss us, they are worried about the disturbance that such a close pass will...

Geological Society of America | October 27-30, 2002 | Christy A. Glatz, Dallas H. Abbott, and Alice A. NunesAn impact event occurred at 2.15±0.5 Ma in the Bellingshausen Sea. It littered the oceanic floor with asteroidal debris. This debris is found within the Eltanin Impact Layer. Although the impact layer was known, the crater had yet to be discovered. We have found a possible source crater at 53.7S,90.1W under 5000 meters of water. The crater is 132±5km in diameter, much larger than the previously proposed size of 24 to 80 km.

Evidence of Astronomical Aspects of Mankind's Past and Recent Climate Homepage | FR Post 9-4-2 | Timo NiromaThe Climax of a Turbulent Millennium: Evidence for Major Impact Events in the late Third Millennium BC Timo Niroma, Helsinki, Finland The First Intermediate PeriodThe Curse of AkkadTroy IIgThird Millennium BC Climate Change and Old World CollapseNatural Catastrophes during Bronze Age Civilisations Two separate cataclysmsSodom and GomorrahWhere did the impacts occur? The First Intermediate Period Selections from "The Egyptians" by C. Aldred (London 1987). "At this distance of time, the overthrow of the Old Kingdom at the end of the Sixth Dynasty has all the appearance of being sudden and complete. "Recent research has attributed the abrupt nature of...

SIS Conference | Emilio SpedicatoEvidence Of Tunguska-type Impacts Over The Pacific Basin Around The Year 1178 A.D. Emilio Spedicato University of Bergamo, Piazza Rosate 2, 24129 Bergamo, Italy, email: emilio@ibguniv.unibg.it In year 1178 A.D., as related by Clube and Napier in their book The Cosmic Serpent, a strange event was observed to affect the Moon, which may be explained by a large impact on the hidden face, originating the Giordano Bruno crater. A number of observations suggest that catastrophic cometary or meteoritic impacts around the same time also affected the Pacific basin: Maori legends of great fires destroying forests and the moa bird, to...

Rochester Academy of Science | January 1998 | Paul DudleyConsidering that news is still dominated by the tsunami and its aftereffects (and aid and recovery efforts), my mind is still on that kind of topic. I recalled back during the days when the Chicxulub impact site was being identified as the main Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) event that the supporting evidence for the regional location was thick layers of ejecta at the K/T boundary found around the Caribbean. I checked for pictures and found a few; below is one of the best from Belize. Can you see the K/T boundary? Go to the linked article to read more about this image...

Inspiration: the "close approach" of the Japanese satellite Hayabusa to the asteroid Itokawa. Hayabusa is actually going to attempt to gather material from Itokawa using an impactor, and it will deploy a micro-robot that hops around the asteroid. Cool mission -- the samples are supposed to land in the Australian outback in 2007. Hayabusa Hovers Near Asteroid Itokawa So why the images? Well, the cenote was caused by the K/T impactor, and that's what I thought of today. According to a long-remembered National Geographic article, the Chichen Itza cenote was supposedly the site of human sacrifices; after the sacrifice was...

Near Earth Object Information Centre | 8/20/2004 | staffThe collision happened around 870 000 years ago, a time when Homo erectus, man's early ancestor, was still roaming the planet. Molten asteroid slabs melted through more than 1.5 kilometres of ice and snow to reach the underlying bedrock... Billions of tons of ice, snow and rock would have been vaporised and thrown into the atmosphere. Rock particles that fell to the ground have been located more that 5 000 kilometres away in Australia. The impact was so immense that it is being considered as the cause of a reversal of the Earth's magnetic polarity around this time. One...

Icarus (Volume 104, Issue 2 , pp 280-290) | August 1993 | Jack B. Hartung(actual link) Corvid meteors observed only in late June of 1937 may be secondaries from the Giordano Bruno impact in June of 1178. Objects that products meteorite falls, fireballs, airwaves, and flashes on the Moon do not show a preference for late June and, therefore, are not part of the Taurid Complex.

unknowncountry.com | 18May2005< snip >....Satellite map of Magnolia Park, Florida shows a clear view of an unusual object floating above 39th Street in the town. The shadow on the object is similar to the shadows on the ground, meaning that it is in the atmosphere relatively close to the surface, probably no higher than 20,000 feet. There are no towers or unusual objects in the area that could account for the formation, which appears to be in rapid vibrational movement. Because of the unusual motion visible on its surface, it is not likely that this is a balloon. Without knowing its distance...

Yahoo / AP | August 24 2004 | editorsMicroscopic analysis, reported in the current issue of the journal Geology, revealed a 3-inch-thick layer of "shocked quartz" -- a form of the mineral produced only under intense pressure like that of an impact -- that dated to 35.5 million years ago, when a space rock slammed into the Earth about 120 miles southeast of present-day Washington.

Frontiers | 4 March 2004 | Clark R. ChapmanThe actual damage that a NEA impact might cause on Earth was concretely described by Baldwin, a leading advocate for the impact origin of lunar craters. Later, Opik... proposed that NEA impacts might account for mass extinctions in the Earth's paleontological record. Around the same time, Shoemaker firmly established the impact origin of Meteor Crater in Arizona... [I]t was not only a cultural but a scientific shock when Mariner 4's first photographs of the Martian surface revealed it to be covered by craters; a decade later, Mariner 10 found the same on Mercury... In 1979 and 1980, the Voyagers first...

Science Daily | 6-18-2003 | NASASource: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Date: 2003-06-18 Headless Comets Survive Plunge Through Sun's Atmosphere A run through the jungle is too easy; for the ultimate reality show contest, try a race through the Sun's atmosphere, where two comets recently lost their heads. The tails from a pair of comets survived a close encounter with the Sun, even after the Sun's intense heat and radiation vaporized their heads (nuclei and coma), an extremely rare event photographed by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft. On May 24, 2003, a pair of comets arced in tandem towards the Sun, their paths taking...

Space.com | 3/3/06 | Robert Roy BrittScientists have discovered a huge crater in the Saharan desert, the largest one ever found there. The crater is about 19 miles (31 kilometers) wide, more than twice as big as the next largest Saharan crater known. It utterly dwarfs Meteor Crater in Arizona, which is about three-fourths of a mile (1.2 kilometers) in diameter. In fact, the newfound crater, in Egypt, was likely carved by a space rock that was itself roughly 0.75 miles wide in an event that would have been quite a shock, destroying everything for hundreds of miles. For comparison, the Chicxulub crater left by a...

personal.eunet.fiAn Impact Event in 3114BC? The Beginning of a Turbulent Millennium. Recurring Phenomenon: The Cosmic DisasterThe Mayan CalendarStonehengeA Possible Source for the 3100 BC Event Collected and commented by Timo Niroma, Helsinki, Finland Go to the Evidence of Astronomical Aspects of Mankind's Past and Recent Climate Homepage Recurring Phenomenon: The Cosmic Disaster Besides the most evident cosmic catastrophes ca. 2200 BC and 2345 BC there are other events during the Holocene that are so widely global and difficult to explain by only the Earth's own mechanisms that a cosmic explanation must evidently be taken into account. The first so-called...

New Scientist | 17 February 2006 | Maggie McKeeIron meteorites thought to have originated in the asteroid belt beyond Mars may actually have formed near Earth, a new study reports... Iron meteorites are made up of iron and nickel alloys and comprise about 6% of all catalogued space rocks on Earth... Studies show that the known iron meteorites come from about 80 different parent asteroids, while the thousands of known stony meteorites broke off from just 40 or so parent bodies. That suggests astronomers should see many "differentiated" asteroids in the asteroid belt today, says William Bottke of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, US. But observations...

American Scientist | November-December 2004 | David SchneiderSperanza points out another difficulty with the impact-origins theory. Large blocks of limestone sit within the boundaries of the Sirente "crater." Such limestone would not have survived an impact. So if Orm's theory is correct, one must surmise that somebody set these giant chunks of rock in place since the crater formed. To Speranza, that just didn't make sense. Speranza and colleagues further argue that Orm's radiocarbon dating gave one age for the main feature (placing it in the 4th or 5th century a.d.) and a completely different age for a nearby "crater" called C9, a date in the 3rd...

University Of Leicester | 3-9-2006 | Andy SandersMass Extinctions - A Threat from Outer Space or Our Own Planet's Detox? University scientists suggest extraterrestrial theories are flawed and that more down to earth factors could have accounted for past mass extinctions Earth history has been punctuated by several mass extinctions rapidly wiping out nearly all life forms on our planet. What causes these catastrophic events? Are they really due to meteorite impacts? Current research suggests that the cause may come from within our own planet -- the eruption of vast amounts of lava that brings a cocktail of gases from deep inside the Earth and vents them...

The Telegraph (UK) | 11-04-2001 | Robert MatthewsMeteor clue to end of Middle East civilisations By Robert Matthews, Science Correspondent (Filed: 04/11/2001) SCIENTISTS have found the first evidence that a devastating meteor impact in the Middle East might have triggered the mysterious collapse of civilisations more than 4,000 years ago. satellite images of southern Iraq have revealed a two-mile-wide impact crater caused by a meteor Studies of satellite images of southern Iraq have revealed a two-mile-wide circular depression which scientists say bears all the hallmarks of an impact crater. If confirmed, it would point to the Middle East being struck by a meteor with the violence equivalent ...

The Telegraph (UK) | 4-11-2001 | Robert MatthewsMeteor clue to end of Middle East civilisations By Robert Matthews, Science Correspondent (Filed: 04/11/2001) SCIENTISTS have found the first evidence that a devastating meteor impact in the Middle East might have triggered the mysterious collapse of civilisations more than 4,000 years ago. satellite images of southern Iraq have revealed a two-mile-wide impact crater caused by a meteor Studies of satellite images of southern Iraq have revealed a two-mile-wide circular depression which scientists say bears all the hallmarks of an impact crater. If confirmed, it would point to the Middle East being struck by a meteor with the violence equivalent...

International Herald Tribune | 21 November 2003 | Kenneth ChangFragments may be 250 million years old About three dozen microscopic shards of rock unearthed in Antarctica may be the fragments of a meteor that killed most of life on earth 250 million years ago, scientists reported Friday. . The shards bolster theories that meteors caused several of the mass extinctions in earth's history when large numbers of species died out almost simultaneously. Most scientists agree that the most recent major mass extinction 65 million years ago, which killed off the dinosaurs, was caused when a meteor struck the earth near the Yucat·n Peninsula of Mexico. . The extinction 250...

BBC | 8-27-2002Tuesday, 27 August, 2002, 12:27 GMT 13:27 UK 'Meteorite' hits girl Siobhan Cowton: "I saw it fall from above roof height" The odds against being hit by a meteorite are billions to one - but a teenager in North Yorkshire may have had one land on her foot. Siobhan Cowton, 14, was getting into the family car outside her Northallerton home at 1030 BST on Thursday when a stone fell on her from the sky. This does not happen very often in Northallerton Siobhan Cowton Noticing it was "quite hot", she showed it to her father Niel. The family now...

American Scientist | November-December 1998 | Kirk JohnsonIn the final section of the book, Powell takes his thesis beyond the comfort zone of many scientists, even some of the supporters of the K-T impact, and argues that impact was a factor at not only the K-T boundary but in many, perhaps most, of the other mass extinctions. To do this he relies on the periodic extinctions in the marine fossil record documented by Jack Sepkoski, the growing number of documented terrestrial impact sites and David Raup's provocative kill curve, which shows the average time between extinctions of different magnitude. Powell is certainly not the first to make...

BBC | 12-20-2002Friday, 20 December, 2002, 01:57 GMT Moon's youngest crater discovered Is this the youngest crater on the Moon? By Dr David Whitehouse BBC News Online science editor Astronomers have discovered the only known lunar crater to have been formed in recorded history. In 1953 a flash was seen on the Moon that was taken to be the impact of a small asteroid. But ground-based telescopes were not powerful enough to see any crater. But now, searching more detailed images of the Moon obtained by orbiting spacecraft, researchers have found a small, fresh, crater in the same position as the flash....

FOX 12 OREGON | 03.12.05 | NAPORTLAND - A flaming object was spotted streaking through the Saturday night sky across Western Oregon and the impact was heard all the way from Salem to Medford, according to various reports. Newspapers across the western half of the state and KPTV were getting phone calls from people who saw the object. Summer Jensen of Portland said she was sitting in her living room with her father when they saw the flash of light outside and rushed to see what it was. "I've never seen anything like that," Jensen said, adding that the object appeared to be moving slowly compared...

February 20, 2003 | Jet Propulsion LaboratoryClementine image of the moon showing the fresh crater believed to be the impact site for the event photographed on November 15, 1953 by amateur astronomer Dr. Leon Stuart. Full press release: NASA Solves Half-Century Old Moon Mystery (click link for additional pictures, including the "Stuart Event" picture of the Moon) In the early morning hours of Nov. 15, 1953, an amateur astronomer in Oklahoma photographed what he believed to be a massive, white-hot fireball of vaporized rock rising from the center of the Moon's face. If his theory was right, Dr. Leon Stuart would be the first and only...

space.com | 29 Jul 03 | Leonard DavidNew Theory: Catastrophe Created Mars' Moons By Leonard David Senior Space Writer posted: 07:00 am ET 29 July 2003 PASADENA, California -- The two moons of Mars -- Phobos and Deimos -- could be the byproducts of a breakup of a huge moon that once circled the red planet, according to a new theory. The capture of a large Martian satellite may have taken place during or shortly after the formation of the planet, with Phobos and Deimos now the surviving remnants. Origin of the two moons presents a longstanding puzzle to which one researcher proposed the new solution at...

Alaska Science Forum | July 7, 1998 | Ned RozellTo the rhinos and crocodiles of the far north, the day was like any other. They ate, swam and napped, unaware a celestial body was headed their way at 60,000 miles per hour. Suddenly, a wayward comet screamed into the atmosphere, struck Earth and created a bowl a mile deep and 15 miles in diameter.

Pravda | 03/11/2004 12:50 | Grigory DonskovRemains of an ancient civilization discovered in the depths of the Northern sea While some scientists spend all their time and efforts in search of Atlantis, others have already discovered remains of an ancient civilization that had existed on the same territory as present-day Northern sea. With the help of modern technology, archaeologists were able to get a better glimpse of the ancient world. Approximately 10 000 years ago the entire bottom of the Northern sea had been a blossoming valley, inhabited by ancestors of modern-day Europeans. Scientists from the Birmingham University were able to reach such conclusion after reconstructing...

spaceweather.com | april-15-2003 | spaceweather.comODD ASTEROID: On April 7th, astronomers discovered a near-Earth asteroid following a curious path around the Sun. The orbit of 2003 GQ22 is nestled almost entirely inside Earth's own. "2003 GQ22 is nearly a member of the elusive inner-Earth object group, for which there is thought to be several members, but only one discovered to date (2003 CP20)," says Donald Yeomans, the manager of JPL's Near Earth Object Program. Inner-Earth asteroids start out like most space rocks--orbiting the Sun in the asteroid belt beyond Mars. But over the course of time, perhaps hundreds of millions of years or longer, they...

High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center | since 1992 | StarChildThis photograph was taken by S. Eichmiller in Altoona, Pennsylvania just after the main meteoroid body broke up into fragments. The events surrounding the fall of the Peekskill meteorite on October 9, 1992 were quite unique. It was observed by many people who were attending a football game, being photographed and videotaped by over a dozen people. The meteorite was found crashed into the trunk of a parked car.

The Guardian (UK) | 1-6-2004 | Giles TremlettPolice on meteor alert after huge balls of fire light up Spanish sky Giles Tremlett in Madrid Tuesday January 6, 2004 The Guardian (UK) Was it a brightly shining star leading the present-laden three kings to the homes of millions of children at today's Epiphany, Spain's biggest gift-giving day of Christmas? As police scoured a remote mountainous district of the northern LeÛn province yesterday for remnants of a large, brilliant, burning object that fell to earth on Sunday, the most likely explanation was that it was part of a meteor. The search concentrated near Renedo de Valderaduey after neighbours saw...

Summary (Sep 29, 2004): Today's close passage of the relatively large asteroid, Toutatis, has presented astronomers with a new ruler to measure solar system distances. By using two telescopes separated by hundreds of miles, the classic parallax method validates the asteroid's orbital path. Precise Distance to Doomsdaybased on ESO report The painting titled "K/T Hit" by artist Donald E. Davis. This impact occured 65 million years ago, ending the reign of the dinosaurs.Image Credit: Don Davis Today, September 29, 2004, is undisputedly the Day of Toutatis, the famous "doomsday" asteroid. Not since the year 1353 did this impressive "space rock"...

Science Daily | 4-12-2002 | CornellDate: Posted 4/12/2002 Radar Reveals Five Double Asteroid Systems Orbiting Each Other Near Earth, Likely Formed In Close Encounters With Planet ITHACA, N.Y. -- Binary asteroids -- two rocky objects orbiting about one another -- appear to be common in Earth-crossing orbits, astronomers using the world's two most powerful astronomical radar telescopes report. And it is probable, they say, that these double asteroid systems have been formed as a result of gravitational effects during close encounters with at least two of the inner planets, including Earth. Writing in a report published by the journalScience on its Science Express web site...

NASA's Near Earth Object Program Office | Wednesday, March 17, 2004 | Steven R. ChesleyA small near-Earth asteroid (NEA), discovered Monday night by the NASA-funded LINEAR asteroid survey, will make the closest approach to Earth ever recorded. There is no danger of a collision with the Earth during this encounter. The object, designated 2004 FH, is roughly 30 meters (100 feet) in diameter and will pass just 43,000 km (26,500 miles, or about 3.4 Earth diameters) above the Earth's surface on March 18th at 5:08 PM EST (2:08 PM PST, 22:08 UTC). (Close approach details here). On average, objects about the size of 2004 FH pass within this distance roughly once every two years,...

Scotsman | 10/17/04 | John von RadowitzPeople living in southern Germany during Roman times may have witnessed a comet impact 5,000 times more destructive than the Hiroshima atom bomb, researchers say. Scientists believe a field of craters around Lake Chiemsee, in south-east Bavaria, was caused by fragments of a huge comet that broke up in the Earth's atmosphere. Celtic artefacts found at the site, including a number of coins, appear to have been strongly heated on one side. This discovery, together with evidence from ancient tree rings and Roman reports of 'stones falling from the sky', has led researchers to conclude that the impact happened in...

Yahoo/AP | 12/23/04 | JOHN ANTCZAKScientist: Asteroid May Hit Earth in 2029 Thu Dec 23, 5:40 PM ET By JOHN ANTCZAK, Associated Press Writer LOS ANGELES - There's a 1-in-300 chance that a recently discovered asteroid, believed to be about 1,300 feet long, could hit Earth in 2029, a NASA (news - web sites) scientist said Thursday, but he added that the perceived risk probably will be eliminated once astronomers get more detail about its orbit. -- There have been only a limited number of sightings of Asteroid 2004 MN4, which has been given an initial rating of 2 on the 10-point Torino Impact Hazard...

Brisbane Courier Mail | 25 August 2005 | Robyn GraceAN asteroid the size of a house that exploded with the power of an atom bomb over Antarctica last year may help scientists prepare for the entrance of larger bodies into the Earth's atmosphere. The 1000-tonne asteroid crashed to Earth in millions of pieces last September, 900km from the nearest humans at Japan's Syowa station. A trail of dust recorded by a physicist 1500km away at Australia's Davis station shows that if the asteroid had not fragmented into tiny pieces when it hit the Earth's atmosphere, it would have had an impact similar to the bombing of Hiroshima. Dr Andrew...

Ananova | 6-12-2003Scientists uncover 'deep impact' disaster from spaceA new report suggests that a massive object from space smashed into what is now the Moroccan desert 380 million years ago, wiping out 40% of the world's marine species. The discovery adds to the evidence linking such impacts with mass extinction events. Only one other impact by a large comet or asteroid has convincingly been held responsible for a mass extinction. That occurred off the Yucatan peninsular in Mexico 65 million years ago and is thought to have ended the reign of the dinosaurs. The newly discovered impact coincided with the Kacak/otomari extinction,...

space.com | 9/25/2002 | diana jongThe Search for the Missing Amazon Meteor Wed Sep 25, 9:27 AM ET By Diana Jong Staff Writer, SPACE.com The Araona people wanted $1 million before they would let the NASA ( news - web sites) scientists pass through their territory in the remote Bolivian Amazon. Given a budget of $20,000 for their entire expedition, the scientists resorted to negotiating, and the indigenous people eventually agreed to a payment of $500, plus 500 rounds of .22 ammunition and 200 D-cell batteries. "They couldn't be Eveready; they had to be Rayovac," recalls Compton Tucker, an earth scientist from NASA's Goddard Space...

The Times | 7 June 2003 | Robin ShepherdIF IT had hit Central London, Britain would no longer have a capital city. The force of the meteorite that hit eastern Siberia last September destroyed 40 square miles of forest and caused earth tremors felt 60 miles away. An expedition from Russia's Kosmopoisk institute has only recently reached the site in a remote area north of Lake Baikal because of bad weather and difficult terrain, the Interfax news agency said yesterday. Fragments of the meteorite had apparently exploded into shrapnel 18 miles above the Earth with the force of at least 200 tonnes of TNT. At the time, Russian...

Space dot com | 22 December 2004 | Robert Roy BrittThe object, named 2004 YD5, was about 16 feet (5 meters) wide, though that's a rough estimate based on its distance and assumed reflectivity. Had it entered the atmosphere, it would have exploded high up, experts figure. The asteroid passed just under the orbits of geostationary satellites, which at 22,300 miles (36,000 kilometers) altitude are the highest manmade objects circling Earth. Most other satellites, along with the International Space Station, circle the planet at just a few hundred miles up... the second closest pass of an asteroid ever observed by telescope, according to the Asteroid/Comet Connection, a web site that...

University of Iowa | circa 1999 | Louis A. FrankGiven the reality of the dark spots, which soon became known as "atmospheric holes" because of their appearance in the images, there is only one explanation which has endured over all these years to present. That is, the holes are due to the shadowing of the atmospheric light by an object above the atmosphere. This object simply cannot be a stony or iron meteor because the holes are very large, tens of miles in diameter. A rock of this size would provide a disastrous impact on the Earth's surface. As it turns out, water vapor is very good at absorbing...

BBC News | 24 July, 2002 | By Dr David WhitehouseWednesday, 24 July, 2002, 02:29 GMT 03:29 UK Space rock 'on collision course' -- An asteroid could devastate Earth -- By Dr David Whitehouse BBC News Online science editor An asteroid discovered just weeks ago has become the most threatening object yet detected in space. A preliminary orbit suggests that 2002 NT7 is on an impact course with Earth and could strike the planet on 1 February, 2019 - although the uncertainties are large. Astronomers have given the object a rating on the so-called Palermo technical scale of threat of 0.06, making NT7 the first object to...

BBC | 01-07-2002Monday, 7 January, 2002, 02:24 GMT Space rock to hurtle past Earth Multiple images of Asteroid 2001 YB5 show rapid motion By BBC News Online science editor Dr David Whitehouse An asteroid discovered just a month ago is making a close approach to the Earth. Although there is no danger of collision with it, astronomers say that its proximity reminds us just how many objects there are in space that could strike our planet with devastating consequences. It will pass less than twice the Moon's distance from us as the rocky body moves closer to the Sun. It is thought ...

National Geographic | 5-9-2002 | Ben HarderWhat Caused Argentina's Mystery Craters? By Ben Harder for National Geographic News May 9, 2002 For more than a decade, planetary scientists have been puzzling over a mixed bag of meteorite evidence scarring Argentina's plains. They gradually pieced together clues to reconstruct what seemed to be a rough-hewn but generally accurate account of a prehistoric meteorite impact. A mere 10,000 years ago, scientists deduced in the original theory, a sizable meteorite came hurtling through the atmosphere at a bizarrely low angle, smacked the ground with a glancing blow, and broke into numerous pieces that gouged separate, miles-long scars in the...

SPACE dot COM | 18 March 2002 ,posted: 03:00 pm ET | By Leonard David, Senior Space WriterAsteroid Vesta: The 10th Planet? Discovery Brightens Odds of Finding Another Pluto Nemesis: The Million Dollar Question HOUSTON, TEXAS -- Our solar system may have had a fifth terrestrial planet, one that was swallowed up by the Sun. But before it was destroyed, the now missing-in-action world made a mess of things. Space scientists John Chambers and Jack Lissauer of NASA's Ames Research Center hypothesize that along with Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars -- the terrestrial, rocky planets -- there was a fifth terrestrial world, likely just outside of Mars's orbit and before the inner asteroid belt. Moreover, Planet V...

PhysOrg | December 13, 2005 | AFPAstronomers working in Canada, France and the United States said they had found a small deep-space object, nicknamed Buffy, that challenges mainstream theories about the evolution of the Solar System. The rock lies in the Kuiper Belt, the name for the flock of objects beyond Neptune's orbit that are believed to be leftover rubble from the Solar System's building phase and are the source for many comets... Measuring between 500 and 1,000 kilometers (300 to 600 miles) across and taking about 440 years to make just one circuit of the Sun, Buffy is remarkable not for its size -- around...

SPACE dot COM | 03 April 2001 | By Robert Roy BrittNemesis: Does the Sun Have a 'Companion'?By Robert Roy BrittSenior Science Writerposted: 07:00 am ET03 April 2001 "The trouble with most folks isn't so much their ignorance. It's know'n so many things that ain't so." -- A favorite quote of Richard A. Muller, by 19th century humorist Josh Billings.When you think big, as Richard A. Muller does, you're bound to create ideas now and then that are so compelling you just can't let go of them -- ideas so outlandish that mainstream scientists are equally eager to dismiss them.Muller, a physicist at University of California at Berkeley, has had...

New Scientist | 14 February 2002 | Will KnightNew calculations that indicate how the Moon's surface and interior react to the gravitational pull of the Earth and the Sun have produced further evidence that molten "slush" exists beneath the lunar surface... The first evidence of a soft region near the Moon's core was found using seismological equipment placed at different places on the surface during the Apollo missions. These found that moonquakes lost their energy when they traveled further than 1,000 kilometers below the Moon's surface. Since 1977, when these measurements ended, there has been no further evidence.

Creation-Evolution Headlines | Creation-Evolution HeadlinesNot Enough Comets in the Cupboard -- 09/03/2003 There's a shortage of comets. -- The Hubble Space Telescope peered into the Kuiper Belt cupboard, and found it nearly empty -- only 4% of the predicted supply was found. -- Astronomers needed a bigger storehouse to explain the number of short-period comets now inhabiting the solar system. -- The Kuiper Belt, a region of small icy bodies beyond Neptune, has been the favored source of comets with orbital periods 200 years or less, but the new measurements, soon to be published in the Astrophysical Journal, are 'wildly inconsistent' with the observed number of...

Scientific American (online) | April 20, 2005 | Sarah GrahamJafar Arkani-Hamed of McGill University discovered that five impact basins--dubbed Argyre, Hellas, Isidis, Thaumasia and Utopia--form an arclike pattern on the Martian surface. Three of the basins are well-preserved and remain visible today. The locations of the other two, in contrast, were inferred from measurements of anomalies in the planet's gravitational field... a single source--most likely an asteroid that was initially circling the sun in the same plane as Mars--created all five craters. At one point the asteroid passed close to the Red Planet... and was broken apart by the force of the planet's gravity. The resulting five pieces subsequently...

BBC | 1-13-03 | Dr David WhitehouseReworked images reveal hot Venus By Dr David Whitehouse Mars it is not: Reprocessed Venus image As the world looks at Mars, an American scientist has produced the best images ever obtained from the surface of a rather different planet - Venus. The second planet from the Sun is blanketed with a thick layer of cloud. Computer researcher Don Mitchell used original digital data from two Soviet Venera probes that landed in 1975. His reprocessed and recalibrated images provide a much clearer view of the Venusian surface which is hotter even than the inside of a household oven. Original digital...

Nature Magazine | Dec 2/ 2004 | Scott J. Kenyon and Benjamin C. BromleyIf you can make sense of it, here's the article: Stellar encounters as the origin of distant Solar System objects in highly eccentric orbits SCOTT J. KENYON AND BENJAMIN C. BROMLEY The Kuiper belt extends from the orbit of Neptune at 30 AU to an abrupt outer edge about 50 AU from the Sun. Beyond the edge is a sparse population of objects with large orbital eccentricities. Neptune shapes the dynamics of most Kuiper belt objects, but the recently discovered planet 2003 VB12 (Sedna) has an eccentric orbit with a perihelion distance of 70 AU, far beyond Neptune's gravitational influence....

MSNBC Space News | Jan. 11, 2006 | By Robert Roy BrittComputer modeling suggests that collision affected its formation New computer modeling shows that the planet Mercury might have been formed in a hit-and-run collision that stripped off its outer layers. Astronomers have long assumed that collisions played a huge role in planet formation. The early solar system would have been loaded with dust that became rock that became planets, the thinking goes. Computer models generally have objects sticking together to make ever-larger objects ó or in large crashes, two objects might become gravitationally bound. In the new scenario, a glancing blow would dramatically alter the smaller object, even disintegrating...

Alaska Science Forum (Article #742) | November 11, 1985 | Larry GedneyPresent-day nautilus shells almost invariably show thirty daily growth lines (give or take a couple) between the major partitions, or septa, in their shells. Paleontologists find fewer and fewer growth lines between septa in progressively older fossils. 420 million years ago, when the moon circled the earth once every nine days, the very first nautiloids show only nine growth lines between septa. The moon was closer to the earth and revolved about it faster, and the earth itself was rotating faster on its axis than it is now. The day had only twenty-one hours, and the moon loomed enormous in...

A bright star suddenly appears on April 30, 1006 near the star Beta Lupi in the constellation Lupus. This bright star is yellowish-white in color. The star gets brighter, bright to a point, it is brighter than Venus and half Moon. It has a magnitude of -9 at its peak. The star was visible for a year and it disappeared afterwards. The bright star was a supernova. Supernovas are when a star explodes. The Supernova is recorded in Korea, China, Japan, Mesopotamia, and Europe, often by astrologers. The supernova was seen as an omen. The remnants of the 1006 Supernova...

NASA | 09-01-04 | Robert Nemiroff and Jerry BonnellAstronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2004 September 1 An Inner Neptune for 55 Cancri Illustration Credit: U. Texas, NSF, NASA Explanation: Is our Solar System unique? The discovery of a Neptune-mass planet in an sub-Mercury orbit around nearby Sun-like star 55 Cancri, announced yesterday along with the discovery of other similar systems, gives a new indication that planetary systems as complex as our own Solar System likely exist elsewhere. The planet, discovered in...

space DOT COM | 23 January 2003 | By Robert Roy BrittDeadly Dance: Giant Planet Found Orbiting Huge Star By Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer posted: 07:00 am ET 23 January 2003 A large planet recently found orbiting a distant star serves as a preview for the likely frying fate that awaits our own planet. The star, called HD 47536, is more than 23 times the diameter of our Sun. It is the largest star ever found to harbor a planet. The discovery was announced Wednesday. The planet is five to 10 times heavier than Jupiter and orbits the star more than twice as far as Earth is from...

SpaceRef | 09/30/2004 | NASAAfter a Trio of Explosions Scientists say Supernova is ImminentThree powerful recent blasts from three wholly different regions in space have left scientists scrambling. The blasts, which lasted only a few seconds, might be early alert systems for star explosions called supernovae, which could start appearing any day. The first two blasts, called X-ray flashes, occurred on September 12 and 16. These were followed by a more powerful burst on September 24. The burst seems to be on the cusp between an X-ray flash and a full-fledged gamma ray burst, a discovery interesting in its own right. If these signals...

New Scientist Space | 03/31/06 | Maggie McKeeHabitable, Earth-like planets can form even after giant planets have barrelled through their birthplace on epic migrations towards their host stars, new computer simulations suggest. The finding contradicts early ideas of how planets behave and suggests future space missions should search for terrestrial planets near known "hot Jupiters". Many of the 160 or so known extrasolar planets are hot Jupiters - massive planets that are closer to their stars than Mercury is to our Sun. But the planets probably did not form in these scorching regions because there would not have been enough gas and dust there to amass such...

David Jewitt | Last updated Sep 2004 | David JewittMeanwhile, the Doppler discovery of extrasolar planets orbiting very close to their parent stars has raised a different problem. Many of the planets are so close to their stars (<0.1 AU), and so hot, that they cannot be supposed to have formed where we now observe them. By inference, they could have formed at larger distances (several AU) and then migrated inwards. What would cause this inward migration? As with the solar system case, the root cause may be an exchange of angular momentum with material surrounding the planets at their formation. In particular, if the extrasolar planets formed in...

Space dot com | 13 February 2006 | Robert Roy BrittA developing star has been found to have two disks of material rotating in opposite directions. The discovery hints at a future solar system with planets going this way and that. "This is the first time anyone has seen anything like this, and it means that the process of forming planets from such disks is more complex than we previously expected," said Anthony Remijan, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory... "The solar system that likely will be formed around this star will include planets orbiting in different directions, unlike our own solar system in which all the planets orbit the...

CNN / Reuters | October 5, 2000 | Maggie FoxEighteen rogue planets that seem to have broken all the rules about being born from a central, controlling sun may force a rethink about how planets form, astronomers said on Thursday... "The formation of young, free-floating, planetary-mass objects like these is difficult to explain by our current models of how planets form," Zapatero-Osorio said... They are not linked to one another in an orbit, but do move together as a cluster, she said... Many stars in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, may have formed in a similar manner to the Orion stars, she said. So there could be similar,...

NASA press release | July 11, 2001 | Dr. Tony PhillipsIRC+10216, also known as CW Leonis, was once a well-behaved main-sequence star as our own Sun is now... When astronomers turned the satellite toward IRC+10216 they discovered a substantial cloud of water vapor about 100 AU across. ("AU" --short for Astronomical Unit-- is a unit of length used by astronomers. One AU equals the mean distance between Earth and the Sun.) "There must be about four Earth-masses of frozen water around IRC+10216 to produce the vapor cloud we see," says Melnick. The water vapor probably does not come from the vaporization of oceans on an Earth-like planet, because there wouldn't...

Yahoo! News via Drudge | June 13, 2002 | Yahoo! News staffFriday June 14, 3:19 AMSolar system similar to ours discovered: US astronomers US astronomers announced the discovery of a solar system similar to our own, at a press conference at NASA's headquarters here.Astronomers said they had identified an extra-solar planet orbiting this star at about the same distance Jupiter orbits the sun. They discovered a total of 15 extra-solar planets.University of California at Berkley astronomy professor Geoffrey Marcy discovered the star, named 55 Cancri, 15 years ago, jointly with his colleague at Washington's Carnegie Institution Paul Butler.In 1996, Marcy and Butler announced the discovery of a first planet orbiting 55...

Universe Today | Jan. 10, 2005 | Dolores Beasley and Gay Yee HillNASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has found a dusty ring of material orbiting nearby Vega which was probably the result of a series of protoplanets smashing into each other. Vega is the fifth brightest star in the sky, located only 25 light-years away in the constellation of Lyra. This dust is constantly being blown out by Vega's intense radiation, so it's unlikely that the star has had this much dust for its entire lifetime. Instead, this ring must have been formed recently, perhaps when a Pluto-sized object was pulverized within the last million years or so.

Associated Press | Jul 28, 2004 | Associated PressANCHORAGE (AP) - Noting a swarm of tiny earthquakes beneath volcanic Mount Spurr, scientists have warned that the volcano 80 miles west of Anchorage could erupt in the next few weeks. Eruptions most often follow a pattern of quakes, said geophysicist John Power of the U.S. Geological Survey, one of three federal and state partners in the Anchorage-based Alaska Volcano Observatory. Power added, however, that the earthquakes will most likely end without an eruption. Mount Spurr was last significantly active in 1992. In an August explosion that year, it spread a thin layer of ash over Anchorage. The mountain's recent...

Anchorage Daily News | December 25, 2004) | DOUG O'HARRAScientists traveled to the Aleutian Chain last summer to check out a colossal submarine landslide blamed for one of the most devastating tsunamis of the 20th century. They wanted to find out how sea-floor life responded to such a huge disturbance and produce detailed charts. What they got was a shock of seismic proportions. Instead of a 12-mile-wide avalanche dropping 30 to 40 miles down the continental slope into the abyss of the Aleutian Trench, sonar surveys and the remotely operated underwater vehicle Jason II found regular ocean bottom, eroded and crusty and largely undisturbed. There was no slide. And...

AP | 12/26/04 | DILIP GANGULYCOLOMBO, Sri Lanka - Legions of rescuers spread across Asia Monday after an earthquake of epic power struck deep beneath the Indian Ocean, unleashing 20-foot tidal waves that ravaged coasts across thousands of miles and killed more than 13,340 people and left millions homeless in the fourth-largest temblor in a century. The death toll along the southern coast of Asia ó and as far west as Somalia, on the African coast, where nine people were reported lost ó steadily increased as authorities sorted out a far-flung disaster caused by Sunday's 9.0-magnitude earthquake, strongest in 40 years. Signs of the carnage...

News.telegraph.co.uk | 11/11/02 | John PetreBiblical plagues and parting of Red Sea 'caused by volcano' By Jonathan Petre, Religion Correspondent (Filed: 11/11/2002) Fresh evidence that the Biblical plagues and the parting of the Red Sea were natural events rather than myths or miracles is to be presented in a new BBC documentary. Moses, which will be broadcast next month, will suggest that much of the Bible story can be explained by a single natural disaster, a huge volcanic eruption on the Greek island of Santorini in the 16th century BC. Using computer-generated imagery pioneered in Walking With Dinosaurs, the programme tells the story of how...

The Albuquerque Tribune | 01/31/05 | Sue VorenbergA 65 million year old tsunami is still wreaking havoc in the scientific community, a New Mexico State University professor says. The 300-foot-tall tsunami - an aftereffect of the giant meteor impact that some scientists think killed off the dinosaurs - scrambled fossils and rock and has made the event very hard to date, said Timothy Lawton, head of NMSU's geology department.

The Times | 3/30/05 | Mark HendersonMarch 30, 2005 Britain's plan to save planet from quakes and asteroidsBy Mark Henderson, Science Correspondent PLANS for an early warning system to protect the world against natural disasters ranging from earthquakes and tsunamis to asteroid strikes have been drawn up by the Government's chief scientist on the orders of the Prime Minister. A panel headed by Professor Sir David King is recommending that Britain push for a global alarm network to reduce the potential devastation of events such as the Boxing Day tsunami, The Times has learnt. The £100 million initiative, which comes as scientists predict a third...

New Scientist | 1-10-2006 | Kurt KleinerBroken ice dam blamed for 300-year chill 14:21 10 January 2006 NewScientist.com news service Kurt Kleiner A three-century-long cold spell that chilled Europe 8200 years ago was probably caused by the bursting of a Canadian ice dam, which released a colossal flood of glacial meltwater into the Atlantic Ocean. Two new papers, using different computer models, show that the massive freshwater flood accounts for evidence of the sudden climate change, which cooled Greenland by an average of 7.4°C, and Europe by about 1°C. It was the most abrupt and widespread cool spell in the last 10,000 years. Evidence for the...

Newswise | 12-18-2004 | Jeff DonnellyCatastrophic Flooding from Ancient Lake May Have Triggered Cold Period CLIMATE CHANGE, WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION, JEFF DONNELLY, ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE Newswise -- Imagine a lake three times the size of the present-day Lake Ontario breaking through a dam and flooding down the Hudson River Valley past New York City and into the North Atlantic. The results would be catastrophic if it happened today, but it did happen some 13,400 years ago during the retreat of glaciers over North America and may have triggered a brief cooling known as the Intra-Allerod Cold Period. Assistant Scientist Jeffrey Donnelly of the Woods...

BC Hot News (Brooklyn CUNY) | March 29, 2006Brooklyn College Associate Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology Alfred L. Rosenberger is part of a team of Argentinean and United States scholars who have identified a new species of monkey that once roamed the forests of South America. The discovery of the monkey species, Killikaike blakei, is the result of painstaking analysis of a small, perfectly preserved monkey skull that was found embedded in volcanic rock by members of an Argentinean ranching family. The results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. This fossil, which is dated to 16.4 million years ago, is a spectacular addition...

AP via yahoo | Jan 5, 2005 | Katherine Pfleger ShraderWater depths in parts of the Straits of Malacca, one of the world's busiest shipping channels off the coast of Sumatra, reached about 4,000 feet before last month's tsunami. Now, reports are coming in of just 100 feet ó too dangerous for shipping, if proved true. A U.S. spy imagery agency is working around the clock to gather information, warn mariners and begin the time-consuming task of recharting altered coastlines and ports throughout the region. Officials at the Bethesda, Md.-based National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency say the efforts will take international cooperation over months, if not years. Thousands of navigational aides, such...

Michael Wells Mandeville | 2004 | Michael Wells MandevilleThe exact location of the North and South Poles of the Earth's spin axis are constantly changing while the Earth's crust wobbles slightly around and over the poles in the 14 month and 6.5 year cycles of Chandler's Wobble. The eigth graphs in this story board demonstrate that peaks of seismic and volcanic activity come and go in accordance with these rhythms of Chandler's Wobble to produce the El Nino syndrome. The graphs also prove that the total amount of this activity has progressively increased during the last 50 years while the center of Chandler's Wobble has slowly drifted towards...

Times Of India | 7-6-2002 | Akshaya MukulClues to missing pagodas found AKSHAYA MUKUL TIMES NEWS NETWORK [ SATURDAY, JULY 06, 2002 11:49:09 PM ] NEW DELHI: Submerged structures found off the coast of Mahabalipuram in the Bay of Bengal could well solve the mystery of seven pagodas dating back to the Pallava Period (7th Century AD). The Archaeological Survey of India's Underwater Archaeology Wing (UAW) has discovered three walls and a number of carved architectural members of ancient temples running north to south and east to west. Also found are seven big submerged rocks 500 metres off shore. According to UAW in-charge Alok Tripathi, who undertook...

WorldNetDaily | December 26, 2004The largest earthquake in the past 40 years and the resulting deaths of thousands from 33-foot tidal waves are being compared by an American reporter to descriptions of disaster from Holy Scripture. "The speed with which it all happened seemed like a scene from the Bible -- a natural phenomenon unlike anything I had experienced before," said Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs, who was swimming off a Sri Lankan island when the disaster struck this morning. "As the waters rose at an incredible rate, I half expected to catch sight of Noah's Ark. Instead of the Ark, I grabbed hold...

The Telegraph (U.K.) | 04/11/2002 | David DerbyshireA MYSTERIOUS settlement that sank beneath the waves at least 1,200 years ago has been discovered by divers off the south-east coast of India.Granite blocks and walls that lie 20ft below the surface may be the remains of six "lost temples" that form part of local mythology.The ruins came to light after the controversial amateur archaeologist and best-selling author Graham Hancock interviewed fisherman for a recent television series.After hearing accounts of the myth of a submerged city, he and two dozen divers searched the sea bed last week.India's National Institute of Oceanography, which was involved in the discovery, believes the...

BBC | Monday, May 3, 1999 | editorsWhole communities of ape-like creatures may have been killed in volcanic disasters that struck East Africa 18 million years ago... It follows a study of rock deposits close to the once active volcano Kisingiri. These contained fossils of what is believed to be a forerunner of humans called Proconsul... research suggests they may have been caught by a pyroclastic flow. These are clouds of hot gas, dust and rubble which travel at huge speeds from erupting volcanoes. Scientists, who report their findings in the Journal of the Geological Society, believe the abundance of the hominoid fossils may represent "death...

Island Net.com | 4-7-2004 | Keith C. Heidon,PhD,ACMEighteen Hundred and Froze To Death The Infamous "Year Without A Summer" Of the cold summers in the period 1811 to 1817, the year 1816 has gone down in the annals of New England history as "The Year There Was No Summer," the "Poverty Year" and "Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death." The year began with a moderate but dry winter. Spring was tardy and continued very dry. The growing season from late spring to early fall, however, was punctuated by a series of devastating cold waves that did major damage to the crops and greatly reduced the food supply....

The Guardian Unlimited | August 10, 2004 | Ian SampleScientist says governments are ignoring threat of a piece of rock as big as the Isle of Man crashing into the Atlantic Ian Sample, science correspondentTuesday August 10, 2004The Guardian It has everything you could wish for in a cliche-ridden disaster movie. A beautiful volcanic island in the Atlantic is on the brink of catastrophic collapse, threatening to unleash giant waves that will wreak havoc around the globe within hours. And while scientists try in vain to make their concerns heard, the world's governments look the other way. But yesterday a leading expert claimed the doom-laden scenario was not only...

Karin Lydia LouzadaConnect the dots: 1) Heard about a new (small) eruption of Piton de la Fournaise. 2) Piton de la Fournaise is the current "expression" of the La Reunion mantle plume. 3) Thought about what happened when the Indian subcontinent passed over the La Reunion plume = Deccan Traps volcanism. 4) Tried to find a good picture of the Deccan Traps. 5) Discovered that one of the few places to see Deccan Trap basalt layering is Lonar Crater. 6) Lonar Crater is said to be the only impact crater on volcanic basalt. 7) Found remote sensing and surface pictures of Lonar...

BBC | 10 August 2004A collapsing volcano in the Atlantic could unleash a giant wave of water that would swamp the Caribbean and much of the eastern seaboard of the United States, a scientist has claimed. Dr Simon Day, of the Benfield Greig Hazard Research Centre at University College London, UK, believes one flank of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of La Palma, in the Canaries archipelago, is unstable and could plunge into the ocean. If I was living in Miami or New York and I heard that the Cumbre Vieja was erupting, I would keep a very close eye on the...

AP | 07/03/05Sunday July 3, 12:03 AMWater vapor column shoots 1 kilometer into air over Pacific Ocean: Report A 1-kilometer (3,300-foot) -high column of water vapor shot up from the Pacific Ocean off a tiny Japanese island on Saturday, indicating a possible undersea volcanic eruption, a report said. The water vapor, resembling the steam emitted by a boiling kettle, was seen from the island of Iwo Jima by Japanese troops stationed there, Kyodo News agency said. The vapor was roughly 50 kilometers (30 miles) southeast of the island, and was believed to have been caused by an erupting volcano on the ocean...

nytimes.com | April 20, 2003 | RICHARD ELLIS'Krakatoa': The Wrath of the Earth By RICHARD ELLIS The cover of "Krakatoa" by Simon Winchester. When a volcano erupts, it can do terrible damage, as Vesuvius did in A.D. 79, burying the cities and inhabitants of Pompeii and Herculaneum. But as the tens of thousands of people now living on its slopes can attest, Vesuvius is still there, and so are most of the world's better-known volcanoes, such as Etna, Rainier, Kilauea, Paricutin and Fujiyama (yes, Fuji is a volcano; it last erupted in 1707). Even Mount St. Helens, the top of which blew off in 1980, is (mostly)...

UC Santa Cruz Press Release | May 27, 2003 | UC Santa Cruz Press ReleaseMassive tsunami sweeps Atlantic Coast in asteroid impact scenario for March 16, 2880 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE SANTA CRUZ, CA--If an asteroid crashes into the Earth, it is likely to splash down somewhere in the oceans that cover 70 percent of the planet's surface. Huge tsunami waves, spreading out from the impact site like the ripples from a rock tossed into a pond, would inundate heavily populated coastal areas. A computer simulation of an asteroid impact tsunami developed by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, shows waves as high as 400 feet sweeping onto the Atlantic Coast of the...

The Oregonian | May 19, 2000 | Erin Middlewood57 died when the volcano erupted on May 18, 1980 Friday, May 19, 2000By ERIN MIDDLEWOOD, Correspondent, TheOregonianHOFFSTADT BLUFFS, Wash. -- When Mount St. Helens erupted 20 years ago, Paul Nickell's mother and stepfather were camping there. It was as if the mountain swallowed them. -- Their bodies were never recovered. Nickell felt hopeless sorrow seeing their names on the list of those presumed dead. -- "It doesn't seem real until you see their names on a list," he said. On Thursday, the 45-year-old Portland resident saw Ellen and Robert Dill's name on another list. -- But this one brought him comfort. -- It's...

LiveScience.comBEND, Ore. (AP) -- A recent survey of a bulge that covers about 100 square miles near the South Sister indicates the area is still growing, suggesting it could be another volcano in the making or a major shift of molten rock under the center of the Cascade Range. Recent eruptions at nearby Mount St. Helens in Washington state have rekindled interest in the annual Sisters survey and its findings. Oregon has four of the 18 most active volcanoes in the nation -- Mount Hood, Crater Lake, Newberry and South Sister. A recent U.S. Geological Survey report said monitoring is...

Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 25, Issue 3, March 1998, Pages 279-289 | 13 July 1997 | Gregory A. Zielinski, Mark S. GermaniDetermining a reliable calendrical age of the Santorini (Minoan) eruption is necessary to place the impact of the eruption into its proper context within Bronze Age society in the Aegean region. The high-resolution record of the deposition of volcanically produced acids on polar ice sheets, as available in the SO42-time series from ice cores (a direct signal), and the high-resolution record of the climatic impact of past volcanism inferred in tree rings (a secondary signal) have been widely used to assign a 1628/1627 age to the eruption. The layer of ice in the GISP2 (Greenland) ice core corresponding to...

Fairfax New Zealand Limited | 09 January 2004 | staffVillagers talked of tsunami-type waves sweeping up 30 metre cliffs, chasing them out of their houses and into the bush, and they grieved at the loss of their museum with its artifacts -- their taonga -- and their trust in the beautiful but treacherous sea below... Worst hit was the southern area of Aliluki where the terrifying monstrous waves, rather than the wind, caused devastation... Moto Valiana said he had made his sister leave her Kristof home just minutes before it was swamped by a gigantic wave... Across the road, Osa Williams spoke of how she thought her house was...

National Information Service for Earthquake Engineering | Jan T. Kozak, Charles D. JamesAlthough not the strongest or most deadly earthquake in human history, the 1755 Lisbon earthquake's impact, not only on Portugal but on all of Europe, was profound and lasting. Depictions of the earthquake in art and literature can be found in several European countries, and these were produced and reproduced for centuries following the event, which came to be known as "The Great Lisbon Earthquake." The earthquake began at 9:30 on November 1st, 1755, and was centered in the Atlantic Ocean, about 200 km WSW of Cape St. Vincent. The total duration of shaking lasted ten minutes and was comprised...

Las Vegas Sun | February 08, 2005 | APThe 6.7-magnitude quake occurred at 1:48 a.m. about 250 miles northwest of the Vanuatu capital of Port Vila, according to the Web site of the U.S. Geological Survey... There have been no reports of damage from the quake, which was centered approximately 125 miles below the seabed, the seismologist said.

Drudge Report | 12/27/04 | Matt DrudgeMay have shortened the day by 3 microseconds, said gravity expert Richard Gross of Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena... On premise a slab slid into core, Gross said he's done calculations 'to see what effect this (earthquake) should have had.' The result: A day shortened... 'We won't know for weeks,' said a geophysicist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 'So it's a guess, as of now'...

Ananova | 10-28-2002Researchers plot course of ancient American tsunami Researchers have calculated the scale of a giant wave that devastated the north west coast of America 1,100 years ago. Japanese scientists used computer modelling to recreate the devastation from the ancient tsunami. The team from the Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institution in Kobe say the work will help planners minimise the impact of any future wave. The researchers took clues from silt deposits found in the Puget Sound, a Pacific inlet above earthquake fault lines in the Seattle area. Experts say the tsunami could have reached up to seven metres in...

Science Frontiers | September-October 1993 | William CorlissThe real cause of El Ninos is still obscure. However, the recent discovery of over 1,000 previously unmapped submarine volcanos rising from the seafloor in the eastern Pacific may lead to El Nino's source. The synchronous eruption of, say, 100 of these volcanos might warm the ocean around Easter Island a tad -- just enough to warm the atmosphere above a bit -- resulting in a shift of the high pressure area.

yahoo news | 7/21/04 | unknownPARIS (AFP) - European satellites have given confirmation to terrified mariners who describe seeing freak waves as tall as 10-storey buildings, the European Space Agency (ESA) said. "Rogue waves" have been the anecdotal cause behind scores of sinkings of vessels as large as container ships and supertankers over the past two decades. But evidence to support this has been sketchy, and many marine scientists have clung to statistical models that say monstrous deviations from the normal sea state only occur once every thousand years. Testing this promise, ESA tasked two of its Earth-scanning satellites, ERS-1 and ERS-2, to monitor the...

I heard this at the end of a news break on the radio once. Has anyone else heard anything about this? It sounds important if it's possible. What if the earth's axis or orbit around the sun was changed. I'm looking for links with info on this.

Las Vegas Sun | February 11, 2005 at 20:13:45 PST | CHRISTOPHER BODEENBANDA ACEH, Indonesia (AP) - The first images of the seabed that was rocked by the earthquake that triggered Asia's catastrophic tsunami revealed huge ruptures spanning several miles along the Indian Ocean's floor. The United States, meanwhile, said it was preparing to more than double its pledge for tsunami relief to $950 million. The images of the seabed were from a British naval ship collecting data off the coast of Indonesia's Sumatra Island that could be used to help governments develop a tsunami early warning system for the Indian Ocean region. "There are features which we would think are something...

European Space Agency | 7/21/04Rare photo of a rogue wave Ship-sinking monster waves revealed by ESA satellites -- 21 July 2004 Once dismissed as a nautical myth, freakish ocean waves that rise as tall as ten-storey apartment blocks have been accepted as a leading cause of large ship sinkings. Results from ESA's ERS satellites helped establish the widespread existence of these 'rogue' waves and are now being used to study their origins. -- Severe weather has sunk more than 200 supertankers and container ships exceeding 200 metres in length during the last two decades. Rogue waves are believed to be the major cause in many such...

European Space Agency | 21 July 2004Ship-sinking monster waves revealed by ESA satellites -- Rare photo of a rogue wave -- 21 July 2004 -- Once dismissed as a nautical myth, freakish ocean waves that rise as tall as ten-storey apartment blocks have been accepted as a leading cause of large ship sinkings. Results from ESA's ERS satellites helped establish the widespread existence of these 'rogue' waves and are now being used to study their origins. -- Severe weather has sunk more than 200 supertankers and container ships exceeding 200 metres in length during the last two decades. Rogue waves are believed to be the major...

BBC | 8-30-2003Signs of an eruptionFor days before the eruption the volcano had been screaming 'I'm about to explode' Bernard Chouet A scientist has found a way to use earthquakes to predict when volcanoes will erupt. Swiss scientist Bernard Chouet fell in love with volcanoes when he witnessed spectacular fountains of lava spewing from Sicily's Mount Etna in 1969. Now at the US Geological Survey, Chouet has devoted his career to finding a way to predict deadly volcanic eruptions. He is haunted by a disaster in South America that killed 25,000 people. When Colombia's Nevado del Ruiz volcano erupted in 1985, it...

www.livescience.com | Updated 2:35 p.m. ET Sept. 14 -13 September 2005 | By Robert Roy BrittSlow Seismic Slip Event Underway in Pacific Northwest By Robert Roy Britt LiveScience Managing Editor posted: 13 September 2005 10:03 pm ET Updated 2:35 p.m. ET Sept. 14 An important seismic event imperceptible to humans has begun in the Pacific Northwest as predicted, according to the government agency Geological Survey of Canada. The chance of a major earthquake is 30 times higher now for a roughly two-week period, but the odds are still remote, scientists say. The event is called episodic tremor and slip (ETS). It involves a slow movement of the Juan de Fuca and North America tectonic plates...

AP | 6/20/5 | Katie Allison GranjuThe National Earthquake Center reports an earth tremor this morning measuring 3.9 near Clinton, Kentucky in Hickman County. The earthquake at around 7:21 am was felt in four states and was the second in under 12 hours in the area. It was centered nearly on top of the Mississippi River. Dispatcher Marie Hart at Kentucky State Police post in Mayfield says it felt as if the floor was moving. She said it was like the floor turned to water for a few seconds. An earlier earthquake about 15 miles away registered 3.0 on the Richter scale. Quakes of 4.0 occur...

Agence France-Presse | April 2, 2005 | AFPSYDNEY (AFP) - As Indonesians struggled to recover from the second deadly earthquake to strike them in three months, an Australian expert warned the country faced the prospect of a "super volcano" eruption that would dwarf all previous catastrophes. Professor Ray Cas of Monash University's School of Geosciences said the world's biggest super volcano was Lake Toba, on Indonesia's island of Sumatra, site of both the recent massive earthquakes. Cas told Australian media Friday that Toba sits on a faultline running down the middle of Sumatra -- just where some seismologists say a third earthquake might strike following the 9.0...

SPACE.com | March 8, 2005 | Robert Roy BrittThe eruption of a super volcano "sooner or later" will chill the planet and threaten human civilization, British scientists warned Tuesday. And now the bad news: There's not much anyone can do about it. Several volcanoes around the world are capable of gigantic eruptions unlike anything witnessed in recorded history, based on geologic evidence of past events, the scientists said. Such eruptions would dwarf those of Mount St. Helens, Krakatoa, Pinatubo and anything else going back dozens of millennia. "Super-eruptions are up to hundreds of times larger than these," said Stephen Self of the United Kingdom's (U.K.) Open University. "An...

spacedaily.com | 28 May 03 | staffSweeping Civilization Away In A Single Wave Santa Cruz - May 28, 2003 If an asteroid crashes into the Earth, it is likely to splash down somewhere in the oceans that cover 70 percent of the planet's surface. Huge tsunami waves, spreading out from the impact site like the ripples from a rock tossed into a pond, would inundate heavily populated coastal areas. A computer simulation of an asteroid impact tsunami developed by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, shows waves as high as 400 feet sweeping onto the Atlantic Coast of the United States. The researchers...

BBC UK | Oct. 30, 2004The risk of a landslide in the Canary Islands causing a tidal wave (tsunami) able to devastate America's east coast is vastly overstated. That's according to marine geologists studying ancient landslides in the area In typical Canary Island landslides, chunks of land break off in bits, not in one dramatic plunge, they claim. This contradicts previous warnings that an Isle of Man-sized chunk of land could fall off the island of La Palma into the sea, causing a mega-tsunami.

yahoo/AP | 12-26-04 | LELY T. DJUHARI36 minutes ago JAKARTA, Indonesia - The world's most powerful earthquake in 40 years rocked northern Indonesia on Sunday and launched tidal waves that swamped villages and seaside resorts across Asia, killing more than 700 people in five countries. Some 300 were reported killed in Sri Lanka, 286 in India, 94 in Indonesia, 61 in Thailand and seven in Malaysia. Hundreds were reported missing, and the death toll was expected to rise. The U.S. Geological Survey ( news -web sites ) said a magnitude-8.9 quake -- one capable of massive damage -- struck off the coast of the Indonesian island...

Science Magazine | 11/4/2005 | Kevin Krajick*Once dismissed, myths are winning new attention from geologists who find that they may encode valuable data about earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, and other stirrings of the earth SEATTLE, WASHINGTON--James Rasmussen, owner of a funky used-record store called Bud's Jazz, and Ruth Ludwin, a seismologist at the University of Washington, Seattle, make an unlikely professional team. Late last year, they were walking down the beach near the bustling Fauntleroy ferry dock, searching for a reddish sandstone boulder. Native American legends-Rasmussen belongs to the local Duwamish people-say the boulder is haunted by a'yahos, a spirit with the body of a serpent and...

BBC | 6-10-2003 | Dr David WhitehouseWhen humans faced extinction By Dr David Whitehouse BBC News Online science editor Humans may have come close to extinction about 70,000 years ago, according to the latest genetic research. From just a few, six billion sprang The study suggests that at one point there may have been only 2,000 individuals alive as our species teetered on the brink. This means that, for a while, humanity was in a perilous state, vulnerable to disease, environmental disasters and conflict. If any of these factors had turned against us, we would not be here. The research also suggests that humans (Homo sapiens...

Casa Grande Dispatch | 11 June 2003 | Alan LevineThe headline read: "Massive tsunami sweeps Atlantic Coast in asteroid impact...." It was at that point that I wished that I had taken a speed-reading course, because the rest of the headline read: "...scenario for March 16, 2880." I'm really thankful for all those folks who spend countless hours each week with their eyeballs glued to the small end of a telescope as they search the skies, keeping constant vigil for anything heading toward Earth that's larger than a frozen turkey. The men and women of NASA and the Jet Propulsion Lab, college professors and their student assistants and even...

BBC | 12/07/05 | Roland PeaseAncient drought 'changed history' By Roland Pease BBC science unit, San Francisco The sediments are an archive of past climate conditions Scientists have identified a major climate crisis that struck Africa about 70,000 years ago and which may have changed the course of human history.The evidence comes from sediments drilled up from the beds of Lake Malawi and Tanganyika in East Africa, and from Lake Bosumtwi in Ghana. It shows equatorial Africa experienced a prolonged period of drought. It is possible, scientists say, this was the reason some of the first humans left Africa to populate the globe. Certainly,...

ABC Science Online (Australia) | 4/18/03 | Abbie ThomasNews in Science 18/4/2003 Ancient dung reveals a picture of the past [This is the print version of story http://www.abc.net.au An arctic mound of soil covering a core of solid ice in northeastern Siberia (Pic: Science) The successful dating of the most ancient genetic material yet may allow scientists to use preserved DNA from sources such as mammoth dung to help paint a picture of past environments. An international research effort led by Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark reports in today's issue of the journal Science it has extracted well preserved animal and plant DNA from...

Marketwatch CNET | August 2, 2005, 5:15 PM PDT | Michael Kanellos Staff Writer, CNET News.comBacteria froze the Earth, researchers say By Michael Kanellos http://marketwatch-cnet.com.com, marketwatch-cnet.com.com/Bacteria+froze+ Story last modified Tue Aug 02 17:15:00 PDT 2005 Humans apparently aren't the first species to change the climate of the planet. Bacteria living 2.3 billion years ago could have plunged the planet into deep freeze, researchers at the California Institute of Technology claim in a new report. Several graduate students, along with supervising professor Joe Kirschvink, have released a paper presenting their explanation of what caused "Snowball Earth," a periodic deep freeze of Earth's atmosphere that has been theorized for years. The Caltech team argues that 2.3 billion...

BBC On Line | Friday, 19 March, 2004 | Jeremy BowenLast Updated: Friday, 19 March, 2004, 11:06 GMT Did Noah really build an ark? By Jeremy Bowen Presenter, Noah's Ark In the Bible, God tells Noah he has to build an ark and load a pair of every kind of animal before a great flood engulfs the world. It is widely regarded as a myth, but could it actually be true? The story of Noah and his ark is one which sticks in the minds of children and never gets forgotten. God warned Noah - the only good man left in a world full of corruption and violence - to...

Various | VariousDid a planetary wobble kill the dinosaurs? by Nicola Jones New Scientist June 27 2001 Bruce Runnegar from the University of California at Los Angeles' Center for Astrobiology... and his colleagues used computer models to map out the Solar System for the past 250 million years. In particular, they looked at the perihelion of each planet - the point in its orbit where it is closest to the Sun. The perihelion of Earth rotates around the Sun with a period of hundreds of thousands of years. Because of subtle tugs and pulls between the planets, this period changes slightly with time... Their...

India Daily | Dec. 29, 2005Ice ages come every 11,000 years. A mega ice age comes every 105,000 years. Both are due between now and 2012. The 11,000 year cycle happens because of increase and decrease of cyclical underwater volcanic eruption. The 105,000 mega ice age happens because of the changing shape of the orbit of the earth around the sun -- circular to elliptical and then back to circular every 105,000 years. Both the cycles are overdue. They have actually started. Europe right now is in deep freeze. Japan and South Korea are experiencing the worst snowfall ever. Even New Delhi is experiencing the...

Creation-Evolution Headlines | 11/04/2003 | Creation-Evolution HeadlinesThe Downfall of Uniformitarianism -- 11/04/2003 Can major paradigm shifts occur in science today? -- Check this one out. -- You've seen it on TV science programs and in textbooks: plumes of hot magma from deep in the Earth's mantle rise through the crust and erupt on the surface (the IMAX movie Yellowstone has computer graphics of the whole process). -- Perhaps you've seen animations of the Hawaiian Islands riding over a 'hot spot' and building its chain of volcanoes over millions of years on its slow, drifting journey. -- Textbook diagrams show cross-sections of Earth's crust, with lava erupting from channels rooted...

Thunderbolts Picture of the Day | 3/7/2005If you've been following our Picture of the Day, you've seen the electric arc on the upper left more than once on these pages. It comes to us from the website, 'Sparks and Arcs,' sponsored by John Dyer-- http://www.johndyer.com We also include above a photograph of the comet Hale-Bopp, enhanced to emphasize the rich filamentation of the comet tail. Electric Universe theorists identify comets as plasma discharge phenomena -- negatively charged objects moving rapidly through the electric field of the Sun. Some advocates of the Electric Universe have devoted decades to investigating the human past, concluding that Earth's environment was once bursting...

Toronto Globa and Mail | 12/7/01 | MICHAEL POSNERA team of Canadian and Cuban researchers have discovered the remains of what may be a 6,000-year-old city submerged in deep ocean waters off the western coast of Cuba. Using sophisticated sonar and videotape equipment, offshore engineer Paulina Zelitsky, her husband, Paul Weinzweig, and her son, Ernesto Tapanes, have found megaliths "of a kind you'd find at Stonehenge or Easter Island," Mr. Weinzweig said in an interview yesterday. "Some structures within the complex may be as long as 400 metres wide and as high as 40 metres," he said. "Some are sitting on top of each other. They show very ...

Yahoo News | 11/10/03 | Joseph B. Frazier - APTHE DALLES, Ore. - The National Park Service has proposed a marked trail to commemorate Ice Age floods through four Western states that left canyons, valleys, lakes and ridges that still dominate the terrain today -- some so dramatic they can be seen from outer space. Picture an ice dam 30 miles wide, forming a lake 2,000 feet deep and 200 miles long, stretching from the Idaho panhandle into western Montana, containing more water than Lake Erie and Lake Ontario combined. Now picture that dam giving way, the water thundering out in 48 hours, through four states, across Washington and...

Netscape | May 25, 2003It's just a tiny fossil of a fly that scientists found some 300 miles from the South Pole. But this fossil will help them: --figure out what life was like millions of years ago in ancient Antarctica and --help explain global changes in today's climate. One of the biggest surprises of the discovery: No one even knew there were flies in this frozen land where summer temperatures are a bone-chilling 20 degrees below zero. The fly fossil is from the Cyclorrhapha family, the so-called "higher flies" that include the common housefly, reports CNN. North Dakota State University geologist Allan Ashworth,...

Science Frontiers (#51) | May-Jun 1987 | William R. CorlissAxel Heiberg Island in the Canadian Arctic is only 700 miles south of the present North Pole. Little grows there today, but there is on these icy shores the remnant of a forest that flourished 45 million years ago, according to conventional geological dating of the strata... So excellent is the preservation of the forest that its wood cuts as if it were recent lumber and burns readily... Even if the earth was warmer 45 million years ago, could a tropical-type forest survive the nearly six months of total darkness at Axel Heiberg Island? ...Also relevant is the discovery, reported...

www.NewScientist.com | 2/25/2005 | Kelly YoungA bacterium that sat dormant in a frozen pond in Alaska for 32,000 years has been revived by NASA scientists. Once scientists thawed the ice, the previously undiscovered bacteria started swimming around on the microscope slide. The researchers say it is the first new species of microbe found alive in ancient ice. Now named Carnobacterium pleistocenium, it is thought to have lived in the Pleistocene epoch, a time when woolly mammoths still roamed the Earth. NASA astrobiologist Richard Hoover, who led the team, said the find bolsters the case for finding life elsewhere in the universe, particularly given this week's...

The Earth Institute at Columbia University | 04/07/05 | Jennifer FreemanNew tracer demonstrates carbon cycle changes preceded thermohaline changes Scientists from the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) have provided new evidence that ocean circulation changes lagged behind, and were not the cause of, major climate changes at the beginning and end of the last ice age (short intervals known as glacial boundaries), according to a study published in the March 2005 issue of Science magazine. Both ice sheet volume and the 'global carbon budget,' the amount of carbon stored in deep ocean reservoirs compared to that on the earth's surface, changed before ocean circulation patterns changed, according to evidence from...

Waterbury Republican-American | August 2, 2005 | Keay Davidson (A.P.)It might sound preposterous, like astrology, to suggest that galactic events help determine when North America is or isn't buried under immense sheets of ice taller than skyscrapers. But new research suggests the coming and going of major ice ages might result partly from our solar system's passage through immense, snakelike clouds of exploding stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Resembling the curved contrails of a whirling Fourth of July pinwheel, the Milky Way's spiral arms are clouds of stars rich in supernovas, or exploding stars. Supernovas emit showers of charged particles called cosmic rays. Theorists have proposed that when...

New Scientist | 30 January 1999 | editorsAt 8.45 on the morning of 15 April 136 BC, Babylon was plunged into darkness when the Moon passed in front of the Sun. An astrologer, who recorded the details in cuneiform characters on a clay tablet, wrote: "At 24 degrees after sunrise-a solar eclipse. When it began on the southwest side, Venus, Mercury and the normal stars were visible. Jupiter and Mars, which were in their period of disappearance, became visible. The Sun threw off the shadow from southwest to northeast." If present-day astronomers use a computer to run the movements of the Earth, Moon and Sun backwards...

BioMed Central via Eureka Alert | 5-Oct-2005 | Juliette SavinThe authors identified two groups of haplotypes (haploid genotypes, or gene sets associated on single chromosomes) within the analysed sequences. 'Extinct haplotypes' (EHs), or haplotypes which no longer occur in modern muskoxen, were recovered only in northern Asia where the muskox is now extinct. Such haplotypes were found in a number of specimens dated from ~44,000 to ~18,000 years ago.

Space and Earth Science News | December 16, 2004 -- Major Climate Change Occurred 5,200 Years Ago: Evidence Suggests That History Could Repeat Itself December 16, 2004 Glaciologist Lonnie Thompson worries that he may have found clues that show history repeating itself, and if he is right, the result could have important implications to modern society. Thompson has spent his career trekking to the far corners of the world to find remote ice fields and then bring back cores drilled from their centers. Within those cores are the records of ancient climate from across the globe. From the mountains of data drawn by analyzing countless ice cores, and...

Ananova | 6-5-2003Mammoth herds 'roamed fertile Bering Strait in Ice Age' Huge herds of mammoth, wild horses and bison once roamed the land bridge between North America and Siberia, new evidence suggests. Plant fossils have shown that 24,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age, dry grassland covered much of region. The vegetation would have allowed large populations of mammals to survive all year round on the now-submerged landmass known as Beringia or the Bering Strait. Scientists writing in the journal Nature said the animals would have been sustained by a diet rich in prairie sage, bunch grasses, and other grass-like plants....

LORE magazine, Milwaukee Public Museum | 1996 | Peter M. Sheehan, Curator of GeologyPerhaps the most telling evidence that gradualism alone can not explain sudden mass extinction events, is that the sudden events effected organisms both in the oceans and on land. Only global events that effect both terrestrial and oceanic ecosystems are capable of causing these extinctions. Whatever killed the dinosaurs also devastated marine habitats, because the extinction event was just as severe in the oceans as on land... Lamarck and Darwin were not wrong; life evolved continuously on Earth. But Cuvier also was partially correct--there were catastrophic events that redirected the history of life. Cuvier was mistaken only in his belief...

Geo Times | 2-15-2004Mesopotamian climate change Geoscientists are increasingly exploring an interesting trend: Climate change has been affecting human society for thousands of years. At the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in December, one archaeologist presented research that suggests that climate change affected the way cultures developed and collapsed in the cradle of civilization -- ancient Mesopotamia -- more than 8,000 years ago. Archaeologists have found evidence for a mass migration from the more temperate northern Mesopotamia to the arid southern region around 6400 B.C. For the previous 1,000 years, people had been cultivating the arable land in northern Mesopotamia, using natural rainwater...

The Colonial Williamsburg Journal | Summer 2005 | Andrew G. GardnerThe nineteenth day of May, 1780, began in New England like any other pretty, late-spring morning. Fruit blossoms dangled heavy in the warm, newly risen sun. The scent of nectar brought drowsy honeybees from their straw hives. The dawn chorus of songbirds chirped and echoed across the sleepy countryside as farm laborers yoked their horses to heavy wooden ploughs and carts ready for the day ahead. But by mid-morning the pastoral calm would be turned on its head. Laborers and schoolchildren would be scurrying home for shelter. By noon, birds would be roosting in the trees and bats would be...

National Geographic News | May 28, 2002 | Brian HandwerkNew Finds Worldwide Support Flood Myths Brian Handwerk for National Geographic News May 28, 2002 Ancient stories of massive floods pass from generation to generation and in many places in the world are integral to a people's spoken history. The tales differ by locale, but commonly feature either torrential rains or a hugely destructive wall of water bursting into a valley, destroying everything in its path. In many cases, the flooding is an act of retribution by displeased gods. Scientists, historians, and archaeologists view many of these enduring tales as myth, legend, or allegoric tales meant to illustrate moral principles....

Science Daily | November 28, 2005Two new studies of gases trapped in Antarctic ice cores have extended the record of Earth's past climate almost 50 percent further, adding another 210,000 years of definitive data about the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere and providing more evidence of current atmospheric change. The research is being published in the journal Science by participants in the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica. It's "an amazing accomplishment we would not have thought possible" as recently as 10 years ago, said Ed Brook, a professor of geosciences at Oregon State University, who analyzed the studies in the same issue of...

New York Times | 6/29/04 | JOHN NOBLE WILFORDBARNWELL, S.C., June 24 - On a hillside by the Savannah River, under tall oaks bearded with Spanish moss, an archaeologist and a graduate student crouched in the humid depths of a trench. They had reason to think they were in the presence of a breathtaking discovery. Or at the least, they were on to something more than 20,000 years old that would throw American archaeology into further turmoil over its most contentious issue: when did people first reach America, and who were they?

atlantisquestPALEONTOLOGICAL TESTIMONY ---------------------------------------- The Pleistocene Extinction Paleontologists the world over know that something catastrophic happened to the large mammals roaming the world during the Pleistocene Epoch. Woolly mammoths, mastodons, toxodons, sabre-toothed tigers, woolly rhinos, giant ground sloths, and many other large Pleistocene animals are simply no longer with us. In fact, well over 200 species of animals (involving millions of individuals) totally disappeared at the end of the Pleistocene some 10,000-12,000 years ago in what is known to Paleontologists as the Pleistocene Extinction (Click for table). Moreover, there is evidence of large geological changes which took place, such as massive...

Yahoo News | November 10, 2005 | RANDOLPH E. SCHMIDA study of DNA from ancient farmers in Europe shows sharp differences from that of modern Europeans -- results that are likely to add fuel to the debate over European origins. Researchers led by Wolfgang Haak of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, argue that their finding supports the belief that modern residents of central Europe descended from Stone Age hunter-gatherers who were present 40,000 years ago, and not the early farmers who arrived thousands of years later. But other anthropologists questioned that conclusion, arguing that the available information isn't sufficient to support it. Haak's team used DNA from 24...

Yahoo | 03-29-02 | Andrew CawthorneProbe Into Cuba's Possible 'Sunken City' Advances Fri Mar 29, 6:20 PM ET By Andrew Cawthorne HAVANA (Reuters) - Scientific investigators said on Friday they hope to better determine later this year if an unusual rock formation deep off Cuba's coast could be a sunken city from a previously unknown ancient civilization. "These are extremely peculiar structures ... They have captured all our imagination," Cuban geologist Manuel Iturralde said at a conference after a week on a boat over the site. "If I had to explain this geologically, I would have a hard time," he told reporters later, saying examination...

Tuscaloosa News | 1-1-2003 | Steve ReevesProfessor says Mayan calendar does not portend Earth's doom By Steve Reeves January 01, 2003 TUSCALOOSA | Does our planet have only a scant 10 more years of existence left? Some people believe the ancient Mayan calendar suggests the end of the world will come on Dec. 21, 2012. But University of Alabama professor Enrique Gomez is not among them. 'The world won't end in 2012," laughed Gomez, who teaches in UA's astronomy and physics department. 'I can assure you of that." Gomez, a native of Mexico City, said he is much more interested in Mayan culture and how the...

MSNBC | Jan. 30, 2006 | Mac Margolis(snip) Most scholars now agree that hunters--more than climate change or a mystery epidemic--are what doomed the mammoths. Whatever the cause, by 11,000 years ago the king of the Pleistocene was a goner. (snip) If a group of devotees has its way, this shaggy ice-age mascot--and a host of other bygone megafauna besides--may yet walk again. (snip) The scientists, in other words, had managed to assemble half the woolly-mammoth genome; they claimed that in three years they could finish the job. That would put scientists within striking distance of an even greater feat: repopulating the earth with creatures that vanished...

The Cydonia Files | November 7, 2001 | Joe SchembrieNovember 7, 2001&nbsp; The Reality of Ancient Catastrophism&nbsp; About fifty years ago, a Russian psychiatrist named Immanuel Velikovsky wrote a book, "Worlds in Collision."&nbsp; He suggested that much of the earliest history of mankind was deeply affected by catastrophic cosmic events.&nbsp; His suggestions seemed outrageous:&nbsp; that Venus is a comet that was ejected from Jupiter, and that its flybys past the Earth created the tidal forces that explained the Parting of the Red Sea and other miraculous incidents recorded in the Bible.&nbsp; Velikovsky's theories had one big problem:&nbsp; they assumed a highly unlikely coincidence. Evolutionists claim the Solar System ...

06/24/02 | selfThe primary science focus on Bearfabrique is renegade science and catastrophism; evolution is a sort of a second topic. Nonetheless, there's a reason for the evolution page. Evolutionism poisons religion, ethics, and science in equal measure. There is a fabulous new world of science waiting in the wings to be born once the dead hand of evolution and the evolutionists can be removed from the picture. There are several overwhelming arguments against evolution in any form which arise from catastrophism in fact; it would be good for Christians, in particular, to become aware of those arguments. One such argument arises...

SIS - How Historians have now embraced Velikovsky! | Internet Paper Revision no.1 March 2001 | By P John CroweAncient history as taught today is a disaster area. The chronology of the first and second millennium BCE is badly wrong. The history of ancient history revisionism offered here is drawn largely from the pages of SIS publications over the last 25 years. The Revision of Ancient History - A Perspective By P John Crowe. An edited and extended version of a paper presented to the SIS Jubilee Conference, Easthampstead Park, Sept. 17-19th 1999 [1] Internet Paper Revision no.1 March 2001 Contents Introduction An Outline History of Revising Ancient History - Up to 1952. 2.1 Exaggerating Antiquity. 2.2 The Early...

AP on Yahoo | 12/23/05 | Toby Sterling - apAMSTERDAM, Netherlands - Scientists said Friday they found a major cache of bones and likely complete skeletons of the long-extinct Dodo bird, which could help them learn more about the lost creature's physique and habits. The find is significant because no complete skeleton of a single Dodo bird has ever been retrieved from a controlled archaeological site in Mauritius. The last known stuffed bird was destroyed in a 1755 fire at a museum in Oxford, England, leaving only partial skeletons and drawings of the bird to go on. The bird was native to Mauritius when no humans lived there but...

Science Daily | 11-4-2003 | Pacific Northwest National LaboratorySource: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Date: 2003-11-04 Sky-high Icebergs Carried Boulders From The Rockies To In South-central Washington Seattle -- Geologists have uncovered a scene in the Pasco Basin west of the Columbia River in Washington state that shows how boulders piggybacked icebergs from what is now Montana and came to rest at elevations as high as 1,200 feet. Although glacial deposits of rocks and boulders are common, especially in the upper Midwest, "There probably isn't anyplace else in the world where there are so many rocks that rafted in on icebergs," said Bruce Bjornstad, a geologist at the Department...

Ananova | 10-27-2003Solar storm 'could spark catastrophe' Scientists are warning a "perfect space storm" that occurred 144 years ago could happen again at any time with catastrophic consequences. Newly uncovered scientific data has shown the true extent of history's most massive electromagnetic storm which blew up on the first two days of September 1859. Like "the perfect storm" at sea which inspired a blockbuster movie, it was the result of a number of titanic events coming together. But in this case the centre of the storm was the sun, not the ocean. A combination of sunspots and solar flares produced an explosive...

EarthFiles | 11.19.01 | Linda Moulton HoweIn May 2001, engineer Paulina Zelitzky, President, ADC Corporation, Victoria, B. C., Canada and Havana, Cuba, announced the discovery of megalithic structures 2,200 feet down at the western tip of Cuba. November 19, 2001 Havana, Cuba - The story about a possible megalithic site half a mile down off the western tip of Cuba first broke this past May when a Reuters News Service reporter interviewed the deep ocean engineer who first reported unusual sidescan sonar of the discovery. Her name is Paulina Zelitsky. Ms. Zelitsky was born in Poland, studied engineering in the Soviet Union, was assigned to ...

FR Post 6-6-2 | Interview with Ross MacPheeInterview with Ross MacPhee What killed the mammoths and other behemoths that once roamed the Americas? This mammalogist thinks it may have been hyperlethal disease Image: Clare Flemming Around 11,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, North America witnessed an extinction that claimed its mammoths, giant ground sloths, camels and numerous other large-bodied animals. Exactly what happened to these megafauna is unknown. Indeed, researchers have puzzled over their disappearance for decades. Traditional explanations hold that either dramatic climate shifts, or human hunting (overkill) extinguished these species. But in recent years a new hypothesis has emerged. According...

Trust the Bible DOT com | 2002 | Wayne McKellipsWhy I think Noah's "erets" flood occurred around 9,000 - 12,000 B.C. and ended in Turkey. Intro: For a long time I thought the flood waters destroyed all air breathing life on earth, except for those in the ark. That view has problems. I now believe the flood, at the minimum, filled the land of Turkey up with water. As 1st Samuel 30:16 shows sometimes "the whole earth" or "all the earth" can refer to a country or land area. The word translated land or earth in 1st Samuel 30:16 is the main one of the two words used...

Cardiff University via UrekAlert | 06 June 2005 | Professor R.John ParkesSustainable energy source could solve Bermuda Triangle riddle. Experts at Cardiff University, UK, have designed world-first technology to investigate sustainable energy sources from the ocean bed by isolating ancient high-pressure bacteria from deep sediments. Scientists and engineers at Cardiff University are investigating bacteria from deep sediments which despite high pressures (greater than 1,000 atmospheres), gradually increasing temperatures (from an icy 2°C to over 100°C), great depth (several kilometres) and age (many millions of years) may contain most of the bacteria on Earth. Some of these bacteria produce methane that accumulates in "gas hydrates" -- a super concentrated methane ice that...

LSU geophysicist Brooks Ellwood is plumbing the geologic record, trying to correlate known mass extinctions to meteor strikes... Ellwood and four other researchers have just published an article in the journal Science in which they tie an early mass extinction to a meteor strike. This extinction happened 380 million years ago in what is called the middle Devonian. It was a time when only small plants, wingless insects and spiders inhabited the land and everything else lived in the sea. About 40 percent of all species disappeared from the fossil record at this time... What is unique about Ellwood's work, however, is the means he uses to identify the different layers in the geologic record: induced magnetism... Working with LSU graduate students Steve Benoist and Chris Wheeler; structural geologist Ahmed El Hassani of the University of Rabat, Morocco; and Devonian biostratigrapher Rex Crick of the University of Texas at Arlington, Ellwood was able to find high concentrations of shocked quartz, microscopic spherules and microcrysts in this layer, sure signs of a meteor impact. Benoist is a paleontologist and Wheeler is an isotope geochemist; both have since moved on.

Watson claims there were oceans and continental crust similar to what we have today. "Our data support recent theories that Earth began a pattern of crust formation, erosion, and sediment recycling as early in its evolution as 4.35 billion years ago," he said. Even with the existence of water and crust, the Earth was not the friendly place we now know. The planet would still have been quite hot, and the atmosphere would have consisted only of carbon dioxide, water, and volcanic gases. But life may still have been able to exist in these types of conditions. After all, scientists today find bacteria and other microbes living in similarly hostile conditions.

A new study concludes Earth had continents and oceans 4.3 billion years ago, which is just a geological eyeblink after the planet is thought to have formed, in the wake of the Sun's birth 4.6 billion years ago. A separate study reported in May came to a similar conclusion, also suggesting that notions of a fiery, hellish planet back then have been overblown... A world with water and land and somewhat moderate temperatures and volcanic conditions would have been habitable. That does not mean there was life, but the conditions were in place... The conclusion is based on an analysis of hafnium, a rare element in ancient minerals from the Jack Hills in Western Australia. The rocks are thought to be among the oldest on Earth, dated to 4.4 billion years ago... The research, led by Mark Harrison of the Australian National University, builds on work Mojzsis and colleagues reported in 2001 that showed evidence for water on Earth's surface roughly 4.3 billion years ago... Scientists do not know exactly when life began or how it got started. If it did begin 4.3 billion years ago, it may have been wiped out by space rock impacts, only to start up again, other theorists say. At any rate, Earth was a treacherous place for the first billion years or so, until it had helped scoop up many of the asteroids and comets that filled the early solar system.

The team, led by geologist Luann Becker of the University of California, Santa Barbara examined undersea drilling samples taken by oil prospectors in the 1970s and '80s and since held in an Australian lab. They also studied ancient layers of Earth now exposed on land Down Under and in Antarctica. Dated to the time of the mass extinction, they found breccia, a porous rock often linked to impacts. And they uncovered tiny glass beads and material known as shocked quartz, which has been fractured in several directions. These can be indicators of the extreme heat generated when a large, high-speed extraterrestrial object slams into the planet... The findings point to the existence of a 125-mile-wide (200-kilometer) crater called Bedout off the northwest coast of Australia. The ring-like structure had previously been identified as a possible impact crater by seismic data and a map of gravity variations in the area.

While scientists wait for direct proof of water and maybe even life beneath the frozen crust of Jupiter's moon Europa, new data shows it is coated with an acid that could power microbes... Sulfuric acid isn't plentiful on Earth, but on Europa the acid in frozen form covers large portions of its icy surface, he said. The findings were published in Friday's issue of Science magazine... Carlson, Anderson and their colleagues reported earlier this year finding evidence of peroxide at Europa's surface. The peroxide data pointed also to sulfur, and scientists believed that element could easily come to Europa from its neighboring jovian moon Io, which is highly volcanic and spews sulfur constantly. Scientists analyzing the Europa spectral data initially looked for sulfates, or sulfur salts. Carlson and Anderson were surprised when the best match turned out to be sulfuric acid.

One possible explanation, discussed in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, is that Uranus and Neptune formed much closer to the center of the action than their current positions might indicate. In this scheme, Jupiter and Saturn were bullies of a protoplanetary playground, shoving the other two future giants out of the way.

Not too long ago, scientists regarded the orbits that the planets circle our Sun as being the ones they were born in. Now they are realising that this is not the case. Uranus and Neptune may have migrated outwards and Jupiter may have come in from the outer cold. Scientists have always been slightly puzzled by the positions of Uranus and Neptune because in their present locations it would have taken longer than the age of the Solar System for them to form. Scientists from Queen's University suggest that the four giant planets started out as rocky cores in the Jupiter-Saturn region, and that the cores of Uranus and Neptune were tossed out by Jupiter's and Saturn's gravity.

Examining four-year-old data, researchers have found significantly elevated levels of argon, krypton and xenon in Jupiter's atmosphere that may force a rethinking of theories about how the planet, and possibly the entire solar system, formed. Prevailing theories of planetary formation hold that the sun gathered itself together in the center of a pancake-shaped disk of gas and dust, then the planets begin to take shape by cleaning up the leftovers. In Jupiter's current orbit, 5 astronomical units from the sun, temperatures are too warm for the planetesimals to have trapped the noble gases. Only in the Kuiper belt -- a frigid region of the solar system more than 40 AU from the sun -- could planetesimals have trapped argon, krypton and xenon.

While lead researcher Tobias Owen does not put much stock in the idea that Jupiter might have migrated inward to its present position, other scientists on the team say the idea merits consideration. Owen expects the probes will find similarly high levels of noble gases in Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Hints of these gases have even been found in the thick atmosphere of Venus, another planet now begging more study.

The fact that most of the satellites' orbits are retrograde and eccentric speaks volumes about their origins: They had to have come from elsewhere, and been captured by the planets at some point. If they formed at the same time as the planets, from the spinning nebular disk, their orbits would be nearly circular and in the same direction as the planets' rotation, like the "regular" moons... In the case of the irregular satellites, they could not have shifted from an orbit around the Sun to an orbit around one of the giant planets without slowing down -- through friction in an atmosphere, perhaps; the influence of gravity; or a collision with another object... But there are two other possibilities for capture, Dr. Nesvorny said. One is that rapid growth of the core led to a corresponding increase in gravity, enough to pull down a nearby object. The other is that captured objects were a result of a collision between two planetesimals, the force of the collision being enough to dissipate the energy of at least one of them. Either of these two theories may be a more likely explanation for the satellites of Uranus and Neptune, which formed differently from Jupiter and Saturn, without the large amounts of gas.

Retrograde satellites lose momentum to the parent body and slowly spiral inward, which puts an upper limit on the length of time the retrograde moons have spent as satellites, and obviously, will spend as satellites.

The British astronomer W.H. McCrea concluded in the '60s, as others have since, that minor planets could not form by accretion inside the orbit of Jupiter because of its disruptive tidal effects, and R.A. Lyttleton showed in a fluid dynamic analysis of Jupiter's core that its rotation and accretion rates would cause it to become periodically unstable and fission to throw off excess mass. We're told that the gas giants don't have rock cores, but that has always struck me as preposterous, since even if they formed from pure gaseous concentrations initially, bodies of that size would surely attract heavier material thereafter. So conceivably gas giants formed rapidly in the way the Pittsburgh simulation depicts represent the first phase of a process that accumulates fast-spinning cores of heavier material that gets compressed down to rocky densities, and ejects them as a planet and comet factory.

I attribute craters to the activity denoted by the biblical text as "in the beginning." I attribute volcanism on a catastrophic scale to the biblical text which states the "fountains of the deep burst forth" at which time a world-wide deluge also ensued. With the biblical text as guide, the next global catastrophic event will most likely entail disintegration and reconstitution of the basic elements as we know them through a process we generally call "fire."

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